Don't Dismiss Online Relationships As Fantasy 357
Columnist Regina Lynn has a look at how online relationships seem to be blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. "The common thread among these stories is that people get deeply involved in online relationships and make decisions about their real lives. Calling any of these online relationships 'fantasy' dismisses the impact they have on the people involved and on those closest to them... I have yet to encounter anything that challenges my core belief: Relationships are real wherever they form."
Real? (Score:5, Insightful)
So sure, don't just dismiss them as fantasy, but don't just accept them as reality, either. Same as pretty much everything else in the world.
MMORPGs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real? (Score:5, Insightful)
living in the real world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who says online relationships are not real? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are real alright.
Depends. As I have noticed, online relationships' realness depends on how well they pass the test of time, and how well the relationship survives the shit it goes through.
Now that I come to think about it, it's the exact same thing in real-life relationships. Real-life one night stands or relationships that live no longer than a couple of weeks have little credibility.
Re:Real? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's the big clue, guys -- relationships aren't built on sex, love, lust or any of those things (though they help to get a good relationship going). Relationships are built in characteristics like caring, trust, and honesty. If any two people share these characteristics with one another, no matter how they met, who they are, or what part of the world they live in, they can have a successful relationship, online or offline.
Let me sum it up what it did mean (Score:2, Insightful)
Story tells me that your friend was a socially disturbed wannabee. Which, i can empathize much, actually, for i was one of the socially disturbed wannabees who sought out wannabees like your friend and whacked them with great pleasure.
it can work (Score:4, Insightful)
I always shake my head when i hear respected professionals denounce online relationships as fake. It just goes to show they have no understanding of the online culture.
Re:Real? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is, get to know someone without getting your feelings involved in it. Then when you meet them, you won't be disappointed if they're not like they are on line. Only AFTER you spend some real time with them is it reasonable to develop feelings. If you haven't put in the face time, you're not really falling in love with that person, but the idea of the person. Remember, it's just a game, or it's just chat. It's a great way to make connections, but do your loving in person.
Re:Happily Everquest After (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody was physically harmed, but quite possibly somone had their fun spoiled. Purposefully destroying the fun of others is rude, regardless of how it happens.
Similarily, if you're sitting in a park and having a quiet talk with someone, you'd be annoyed at someone who decided to leave their ghetto-blaster, playing the soundtrack of a porn-movie at full volume 2 meters away from you. This action too, hurts noone physically (aslong as it's not loud enough to be hearing-damaging) but nevertheless I think you'd find most people would be annoyed at it.
Is it ridicoloous for an amateur theatre-group to have a play where a wedding is part of it ?
And if not, why would it be more or less ridicolous if the players use online avatars rather than their own physical bodies ?
Does the ridicolousness change if some of the players involved have a crush on eachothers ? It's not as if it's unheard of for actors who *play* a couple to also *be* a couple. (or to become one during the period of the play)
I guess I just don't get it. Are relationships that depend in part or in whole on letters, telephones or any other method of communication not "real" ? Why'd it make a difference if your messages go trough the internet rather than trough the telephone-network ?
In all cases you're talking to real people. In all cases there's a real chance that one of the involved persons are less than completely honest. That's part of life, nothing new about it.
Maybe I'm biased. My first girlfriend I learned to know to a significant part trough writing old-fashioned letters. We had 2-3 wonderful years together. My wife I met trough exchanging email. I find the two situations to be very similar, and don't see what's so special about one being "online" and the other being in "real life" at all. If we'd been chatting or role-playing together online, I don't know what the fundamental difference between that and telephone should be.
strawman? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, caution is needed, but many people are finding love online, and if it works for them, can't we be happy for them? It's hard to meet people in today's society. It's not like we have town dances or whatever the devil they did 100 years ago. (yes, i'm sure some town's have dances still). And really, in the 19th and early 20th century many relationships developed via letters. My grandmother used to send daily 'what's up' postcards to people in the next town before phones, and when phones came along I'm sure many people new each other first only through that medium. So I don't think this is a new phenomenon. If you make the assumption that the other person is honest and fall in love with them, and that assumption is correct, you win. If it somehow isn't, well, there are 50 ways to leave your lover.
Based off what I've seen, we could all use more lovin, online or otherwise. Won't get it as easy by pigeonholing your possible relationships avenues.
uh, what is everquest? (Score:5, Insightful)
so the guy made a bloody raiding party on a wedding. in reality, that's front page horrible news. in everquest, it seems to me to be par for the course
why do you expect any different, why do you think you ever could expect any different? everquest: people have swords and spells. they hurt things. that's the whole damn point of it to begin with: pointless violent escapism. and that's not bad: it's a harmless outlet
i don't think you are deluded. i don't think you are taking something too seriously. i just don't think you understand the rules here
TROLL PARENT (Score:1, Insightful)
How can a comment that restorts to name-calling like this be modded up and not listed as a Troll?
Not to mention your analagy is completely irrelevant. We're talking about a game where the point of it is to go around and kill things. So what are you saying, that the people should go after the wedding slasher and cast a spell on him? Well guess what? It's a game! It's perfectly "legal" for them to do that if they want...
Or are you even suggesting that they are justified to go to the guy's "real world" house and cause him physical harm? If so, that makes you the "socially disturbed wannabee", my friend...
GIFT (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 [penny-arcade.com]
Various types (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:MMORPGs (Score:3, Insightful)
I have seen real relationships formed, but for every one of those I have seen twenty superficial relationships ended by the promise of better loot or a bigger and better guild.
Re:living in the real world (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree, but there are lots of problems with online relationships, though they are not inherent to the medium. In the grandparent's example, it's easy for a 56 year old male to fake being a young female. The idea bothers me, I'd much rather be conversing with the real person, since a real sexual relationship is out of the question anyway. Perhaps people don't value nonsexual friendship enough, and they try to turn everything into sex.
Re:Who says online relationships are not real? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real? (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as the relationship STAYS online, it's fine... But meeting the person in real life can be a disaster.
Interesting point. I'm generally the sort of person who would dismiss on "online relationship" as fantasy, since you don't really know who the other person is. For clarification, I would say that some relationship IRL are a fantasy, too. People often don't really bother to get to know each other, but instead build up little images in their own heads about each other. Sometimes this goes to an extreme, and the whole "relationship" isn't really a relationship at all.
Like, you know how the girlfriend you had in elementary school wasn't really your girlfriend? You're not really dating or anything, but it was more like you were putting on a play, trying to act how your little-kid mind thought boyfriends and girlfriends acted. Well, if you pay close attention, sometimes you'll catch some adults doing the same thing.
However, I think this one part of your post convinced me that I was wrong. Online relationships can be a real relationship of a sort. I mean, there are business relationships and casual acquaintances, and those are genuine relationships of their sort. They just don't necessarily have a lot of depth or weight. I think online relationships can be of the same sort of thing. They can be genuine online-relationships, but you shouldn't confuse that with being real friends.
I know some people will think this is an arbitrary distinction, but I have real reason for saying it. I think real friendships are forged over time through presence and actions. The bonding of physical presence can't be replaced with "virtual presence", and also actions can't be replaced with words. You can say all the flowery words you want, but my friends are the people who will pick me up from the gutter when I fall in.
And when I say, "pick me up from the gutter", I do mean that metaphorically, but not in the sense of "boost my spirits". I've known people who talk a good game and will tell you that they care about you, but when you actually need something from them, something that will cost them, they won't do it. The idea of "cost" is important here. Lots of people will say and do all sorts of nice things for you, up until the point where it becomes difficult or costly. It's the difference between someone who will spend an evening with you when you're injured, and someone who will spend an evening with you when you're injured even though they'd like to be out partying instead. It's the difference between someone who will help you up when you've slipped in some mud, and someone who will ruin their favorite pair of shoes helping you up when you've slipped in mud.
I just think that those are the moments that solidify friendships, and they're such complicated moments that I don't think they can be replicated over wires. Even if someone will "spend time with you" online while you're injured, they can still do it at their own convenience, in their own comfy chair. Even if they send you some money (which I think is the height of online trust), they're just sending some money. There's nothing very personal there. It's all detached.
If you really don't know what I mean by all of this, and you don't think that physical presence and real-life actions mean more than virtual presence and virtual actions, then I'm very sorry for you.
Re:MMORPGs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real? (Score:5, Insightful)
Caring, trust, and honesty are great things to have in a relationship, but remove the attraction and what do you have? You've got a friend.
Re:Happily Everquest After (Score:2, Insightful)
So how does this relate to the topic? Well, the way I see it, MMORPG's are basically like IRC with fighting and kewl graphics. You get attached to your character, you get in to the game because you have fun playing it, but you also are interacting with other people, and you definitely do form relationships of a sort. And no doubt you can form friendships which are totally valid, and they might even translate to the real world. But that's because you're sharing something in common with the real person you're communicating with. If you're friends with someone you've met in a game, you're friends with the scruffy twentysomething who's in to football and listens to metal, not the 45th level undead rogue he's playing.
If you actually are falling in love with a 20th level paladin, you need to go outside.
Re:Who says online relationships are not real? (Score:5, Insightful)
And no one works on changing their voice so they can appear to be more (or less depending) authoritative than their normal voice makes them seem.
And no one dresses up (or down) to try and mask their socio-economic status from whatever social circle they're trying to get into.
And no one flat out lies about themselves in the real world too. All perfectly honest.
Just because you're close enough to a person that you could slap them, doesn't mean the person is any less of a mirage than they are online. Hell, in the world of blogs, you can often find out more about someone than you can from meeting them.
Re:living in the real world (Score:4, Insightful)
So why is this such a shock when it occurs online?
Re:All relationships are a fantasy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Real? (Score:4, Insightful)
People who think relationships are built from attraction are the types who are likely to have infidelity in their relationships and/or are the most likely to get divorced. Successful romantic relationship cannot exist without caring, trust and honesty. Successful romantic relationships can exist without attraction -- it's done everyday.
This isn't science (Score:4, Insightful)
This reminder brought to you by the people out there who haven't yet succumbed to iPhone-style hype religion about the internet, technology or humanity.
Thank you for reading. You will now be returned to your regular neurotic programming.
Re:Real? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why Not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously there's dangers to meeting people and forming relationships online, but there's similar dangers to meeting someone in a store or in a bar - the advantage that online provides is you can figure out generally if the person is genuine, their likes and dislikes and it *can* save several dates and then realizing you like different things.
If it worked for me.. it can work for anyone else.. but just like everyday life, you have to keep your wits about you.
Sounds very much like real life, actually (Score:3, Insightful)
What you should be complaining about is not that the game differs from real life, if anything, it's too much like real life at the office.
Re:strawman? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. I met my wife because, while visiting a friend, I said 'hi' over the fence to his neighbor while out having a smoke on the porch. (I knew her well enough to chat with as I'd been over to my friends multiple times.) The neighbor introduced me (just by way of being friendly and polite) to her best friend who was over visiting... Well, eighteen years the best friend has been my wife for seventeen years.
My best friend met his wife because she was the cashier at the hardware store where he bought supplies to build scenery for the theatre group he volunteered for. I know of dozens of couples who met through the SCA. I know of at least two couples who met at Geocaching parties...
The moral is, there is plenty of places to meet people - but all of them require you to get up from your computer and venture out into the real world. (I.E. pretty much the same way they did it 100 years ago.) It's lame and lazy to blame it on a vauge 'somebody' who doesn't provide a structured way to do what you won't get off your ass and do yourself. ('You' being generic, not the OP, whose circumstances I do not know.)
Re:Real? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Real? - me too (Score:3, Insightful)
We met almost 12 years ago at a place called Shadow BBS, hosted at the Illinois Institue of Technology, it's all but gone now (I think it's still running, but always empty) but in the heyday of telnet BBSs it had a 55 user limit and commonly a 40 person queue. She's not the first woman I met online, so I can attest to the numerous posters above being accurate in the 'crap shoot' type description they're offering.
In our case however, we've been together for nearly 11 years, married for soon-to-be 8 years. Needless to say it worked out. Through all my relationships, online and offline, I've realized one piece of advice that seems to be accurate, and I'll give it to you now.
Relationships (regardless of online/offline status) work in the long term if and ONLY if:
A) it is a marriage of convenience for both parties, and that is -understood- by both parties, or
B) the people involved are (or at least CAN be) best friends.
Option B above is where it's at for people actually seeking a real relationship. Too often I hear people spouting bullshit like 'we're too good of friends' or 'I don't want to spoil the friendship'. Really now, people ACTUALLY think that spending a significant portion (likely the greatest portion) of your life with someone who turns you on but pisses you off is superior somehow to living and getting sexual gratification from your best friend. Foolish.
My wife and I have a marriage in which the longest fights take about 6 hours, and we only have one of those every couple of years. The ability to look at someone and know that you truly LIKE THEM is such a problem solver. It facilitates forgiveness and compromise. The vast majority of that friendship groundwork was laid out in our time talking to each other online. I know I liked this person, I knew we had a similar sense of humor, and I knew she was the kind of person I admire.
Okay, so saying 'I KNEW' is strong there, but once you meet someone it (in my experience) doesn't take very long at all to figure out if someone was misrepresenting themselves, and by how much. She was the real deal. Once I SAW her, the physical attraction (which was already rather strong, she was shaped in a way I particularly enjoy) was boosted significantly by the knowledge of just how COOL this person was (from my POV, of course).
Here's my rant in summary:
Real Life and On Line relationships are different, yes, but they cover a lot of common ground, and can certainly have real and lasting effects on each other.
One more (very condensed) example: Back in the dial-up BBS days there were some kids at my school that I never really liked, some of who I had never really met (2700 student high school), but we ran into each other on the boards. Some of those relationships grew into honest and strong friendships, some of them grew into bitter contempt, but most of them had consequences that spanned the RL/OL divide.
Remember kiddies: A big chunk of what is 'you' is an in-training neural-net. Any input who's signal is strong enough to evoke a non-rote response is also re-writing your personality as it does so. Just because what you're experiencing is symbolically represented doesn't mean it's not being experienced.
Re:it can work (Score:3, Insightful)
Either she doesn't like it, has issues, or just doesn't have a sex drive. After 7 months you should look at your relationship and go "This is normal. Do I want to keep doing this?"
Re:Real? (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's the big clue, guys -- relationships aren't built on sex, love, lust or any of those things (though they help to get a good relationship going). Relationships are built in characteristics like caring, trust, and honesty. If any two people share these characteristics with one another, no matter how they met, who they are, or what part of the world they live in, they can have a successful relationship, online or offline.
You are absolutely correct. I have to add, however, that they keep it going as well. A joyful marriage will not survive without intimacy and sex for the majority of people. (I would even say all but there is always that ONE couple...) Without it you may have a good friend but you will also spend a lot of time feeling like your friend is a bitchy, self-entitled roommate with lots of demands.
And it is even worse for the guy ^o^.
All relationships are fantasy (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no two way communication. There is your feeling towards someone else, it does not mean they have the same relationship with you.
Fortunately, when the fantasy is smashed, most people can get up and go on..but some keep living their fantasy until they believe it is true.
The problem with online relationships, is that people bond(i.e. have mutualy ralationship fantasy) without key data. Looks, mannerisms, daily behaviour off line.
All of which is important, for very real reasons.
The Internet is not a game and I am not an NPC (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a huge internet troll, mainly because i know i couldn't get away that kind of behavior in the real world. my personality online and off are night and day. here i am loud angry and rude. in real life i am quite pleasant. for me, the internet represents catharsis: a mental taking out the trash that leaves me capable of not blowing my stack in the real world
in other words, my personality here is not only completely unlike my personality in real life, my personality here allows me to be someone else in real life. and i completely understand the boundaries
This attitude is precisely the reason I despise internet trolls. Not because of the whole signal-to-noise ratio thing; newbies posting stupid questions and other minor breaches of nettiquette accomplish roughly the same thing and I don't mind them at all. No, the reason I hate trolls is because they treat the internet like some kind of damned videogame and other people on it like NPCs at worst, other players to be "beaten" in the "game" at best. But despite the fact that you're accessing the internet through a keyboard and screen, it's not a damn game. And I don't mean that the internet should be a serious, demure place of pure business and scholarship either; I'm here to have fun more often than I'm here to do work. I just mean that the internet is less like baseball and more like a game of catch, less like the debate team and more like chatting in the living room with your friends. It's not a competition, you can't win at it, and so playing manipulative social games trying to get certain reactions out of certain people for fun (or "catharsis" as you say) is just as despicable as if you were to treat IRL conversations with your friends that way. (Granted, some people do the same thing in real life, and I'd consider them assholes too).
Do you assume a different persona and play social games when you converse over the phone? How about through postal mail, on the off chance that you actually write letters to people? Why is the internet any different? It's just another means of communication - one which, due to its breadth and efficiency, is if anything MORE like real life than the phone or mail.
The same thing applies to people who are dicks in the non-game aspects of online games, e.g. game chat. Yes, if you're playing a competitive game the objective is to blow up the other guy or what have you, and you shouldn't complain that people are being "mean" when they do so efficiently. At the same time, there's this little thing called good sportsmanship which has been pretty well established in real world competitive activities, and I see no reason why it applies any less online. So, just because someone is competing against you in something that actually IS a game on the internet, doesn't mean that when you communicate with them within the context of the game (but "out of character", if such a concept is relevant) you're free to be a dick, anymore than it's OK to shout demeaning insults at the other team in a real-world sport, or to gloat over your victory or throw a tantrum over your loss.
On the other hand, there is something to be said for people behaving differently in person and online. Someone may be more or less comfortable in one venue than in the other, and so censor certain parts of themselves where they're not comfortable expressing such traits. But then, that just gets back to what the person you're responding to was saying; some people reveal their "true personality" more online than they do in real life. If you might be inclined to be an asshole in person but don't feel that that's OK, so instead you're an asshole on the internet (which honestly I've never seen you be, here on Slashdot at least), then that means that somewhere in your "true personality", you're an asshole, and you just censor that in real life and let it out on the internet so it doesn't stay bottled up. Even if the actual personas you're adopting online are all fake and consciously so, just put on for the response that other people give