[ad_1]
A few years ago, I went to St. Louis for the first time to meet my friend Andrew, whom I knew until then only through a group discussion. I was there for his wedding, with the other people on the cat, whom I had already met about half. We spent our time in Missouri visiting local attractions, drinking beer, eating ice cream and, of course, celebrating the happiness of Andrew and Laura. Outside of the ceremony, what I remember most is to feel immediately at home with those people with whom I was only talking online. They were exactly what they seemed – not that I was particularly nervous, because, see, we live in the future now.
There are many types of online relationships: followers, fans, friends and everything else. (Answer dude?) Most of the time, they go in one direction; followers are not friends, after all – at least not necessarily. But they can be. Of course, I am talking about mutuals, people who, by mutual follow-up, appear in your life and manage to stay there, sometimes for years.
The idea of following Someone is not an Internet construct, but its connotations are new. (These days, you can join a cult without ever leaving your home.) Follow someone means you want to see more, or whoever it is their do they choose to put on line. Receiving a follow-up in return is sometimes disorienting as it may sound a bit like impostor syndrome: are they really interested in seeing the useless treasures of my life? Instagram memorials birthday parties they will never participate? The shitposts of Twitter pulled the regular humiliations of being alive? Blogs Tumblr emo sandwiched between memes well ass?
All of this exists in some kind of emotional DMZ. I am aware of these details from the people I choose to follow and they are part of my emotional life, but I am not quite sure what I should do with them. I know I'm happy, for example, when I see someone who wants a dog for years to get one, and I know that I click on the button I'd like to sympathize when I see that 39, he suffered a kind of tragedy. The complicated and unique Internet factor here is that most of these online people you do not know and you may never meet. (Although you probably get the message out, because mutuals are usually people with whom you share interests.) It's a kind of emotional affair, and when it happens over a number of years, it starts to gain luster of a true friendship. What does it mean to know the mundane details of someone's life, watch it under the microscope, but figure it out anyway?
The limits of the Internet have allowed all kinds of connections. many stories are now starting online. When I was growing up in Web 1.0 and that the idea of a global connective tissue was still strange and new, there was the idea of danger for a stranger: that you would be more hurt by a stranger on the Internet only by people closer to you. Making friends on the Internet then felt like a difficult business because if they were not the person they said they were online? Of course, many of them were, and many fears were misplaced.
When version 1.0 was added to version 2.0 and the articles on your life went from exception to norm, the danger of strangers evaporated – or, at least, people are no longer so scared to meet other people with whom they have only spoken online. Online friendships really only work if the presence of someone somehow bears the real person inside. We are no longer strangers. This is partly because of the online dating, where the idea of meeting a random person that you only knew based on what it has put online has been standardized. It turns out that the fear of being alone is more powerful than most others. In part, we are just living online now.
The fact that it is now commonplace to have Internet friends and meet friends on the Internet suggests that something deeper has changed in American life, something related to the way we relate to each other. friendship with people. A common refrain about aging is that the more you grow up, the more difficult it becomes to make friends. There are simply fewer spaces where speaking with a new person is sanctioned, and sometimes life can be too busy to allow people to enter. Although the Internet can isolate itself, it has also enabled people of all ages to create links that bind them together to have to be in the same place at the same time. This is a tectonic change from the old stories of long-time friends who were neighbors, college students or high school students you followed. The liberated friendship of the story of the nuclear family.
Sometimes the process works in the background with close friends from the past who go from friends to friends to Facebook contacts you do not interact with. The assumptions about what is the friendship have changed. It's persistent, it's done online, it's sometimes passive. It's hard to lose track of people.
I am always close to those with whom I went to Missouri; we chat every day. Whatever the case may be, the only reason I know one of them is that the friend who invited me to the group had previously invited me , as well as a few others, in his apartment on Twitter where we were mutual. Now, I can not imagine life without them.
[ad_2]
Source link