Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Internet Friendships: an Appreciation

I do not celebrate Internet friendship. I do have, however, a small group of friends, perhaps such as you, with whom I have had to conduct friendship entirely through means inadequate and unsatisfying, such as the internet. You will say that without the Internet - the connection wouldn't even have existed! True. If we settle for inadequate, unsatisfying means, it is because we must have found a friendship worth such sacrifices.

Because even if the friendship is true and good, the connection sucks. Compared to eye contact, the human hand, a voice that warms the air as it stirs it - there is no compare. It's simply nothing like.

I can't celebrate Internet friendship, I fear. I celebrate those friends for the sake of whose 'ship we make sacrifice. We do our best as friends. Sometimes the best we can do is make the best connection we can.

We settle for a connection that is wholly inadequate, for the sake of a friend.

3 comments:

dogimo said...

And then again we have the friends we have shared air with, broken bread, clinked glass, met gaze, perhaps even pressed flesh, but then distance and time come in. Nothing of the above applies, in that case. Every communication tool to help cross the distance is a benison!

The highest fidelity connection having already been established. Especially where we know our friend well, we can fill in what gaps and static are left by subpar media.

VEG said...

And yet I still consider my Internet friends "friends" because they bring me pleasure in a different sort of way than my IRL friends, yet with the same basic underlying principle, which, sadly, I am too drunk on red wine to think of right now. :) Hi though Bloggs Joe and Dog Joe!

dogimo said...

Oh, definitely! Of course friends are friends. There are media of connections and there are styles of connecting, but between two people who personally do connect, an unsatisfactory communications medium is no obstacle to true friendship.