On the Luas the other day, I heard two young lads talking. One was saying that he got a message from a girl on Bebo asking him to go out with her. She seemed hot, apparently, but she didn’t have any linked friends, so he was wondering aloud about the risks of replying to her. His anxiety was motivating him to talk about it in person with his friend, to gauge his reactions through body language, facial expression, tone of voice; he needed the reflective process of sitting side by side with his friend, musing aloud, to help him decide. When it comes to matters of the heart, that’s the only communication that matters.

This is the anxiety that the internet provokes, the knowledge that people are not necessarily what they seem. We invent ways of simulating more traditional methods of getting to know people, such as linked friends, which take the place of good old-fashioned face-to-face introductions, but they are only really reliable when the friends we have online are the same as the friends we have in the “real” world, such as classmates, work colleagues, family etc. The friends I have on Facebook, or listed in the blogroll I have on my blog, are not strictly synonymous with my real “friends” – I’ve not actually met all of them, and many of those I have met, I am not likely to meet again. The gesture of online friendship is often more like a “thumbs up”, a sort of nice but vague character-reference, or a testament to at least one good online chat or encounter.
The World Wide Web is 15 years old this week. I doubt there’s a technological innovation that has been adopted so quickly by humankind, that has affected our lives so much, in so many areas. One of the most interesting ways it has changed us is in relationships. Through online profiles, chat rooms, blogs, social networking sites, instant messaging and webcams, the concept of the persona, the front we present to the world, the facet of our self that we decide to show to others, has been turned upside down in one generation. While I’m aware that email, newsgroups, IRC, bulletin boards and services like CompuServe predated the web by a few years, it wasn’t until the web became established that the notion of an online profile became commonplace – complete with pictures, avatars, sounds and videos, descriptions, likes and dislikes, talents and needs, political, spiritual, musical, literary and sexual preferences. And I would include all that is google-able about a person as being part of their online profile. (And, for a few bizarre hours last week, in Italy that included everyone’s declared taxable income.)
The journey to get to know a stranger has, seemingly, been short-circuited. What was inside is now on the outside. But is what we present of ourselves “just” online fantasy? And is the relational matrix we are creating more or less “real” than the way we used to interact before? And, for my purposes here, I am not including even more striking examples of these new virtual “realities”, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life.
The personae we are creating in our personal spaces are projections of ourselves; they are billboards, marketing campaigns, personal ads, CVs, manifestoes, galleries, shops, clinics, playgrounds, kitchens, publishing houses, gardens, pieces of art, auditions, boxing rings, debating contests, porn films, notches on our bedpost, brothels and therapy spaces. We wage war or make love, we buy or we sell, we preach or we lament. We seek to belong, by claiming tribal allegiance through football, music, politics, sexual preference or nationality, or seek to separate, and boldly express our individuality, just like millions of others. We lose our inhibitions and embarrassment, and something perhaps more like our “true” self emerges, how we would like to be if we were unaccountable to anyone else.
So used are we to the language of advertising, the tapping of unconscious desire, we have become marketing experts, in our mini-advertisements for ourselves. And, as we become more inventive in our profiling skills, curating them as assiduously as an artist, we can lose sight of the most important thing about them – they are all attempts to control how we are seen, to manage the anxiety of social interaction; which, paradoxically, raises the level of anxiety a notch for all concerned, almost so that no one notices. We are all Wizards of Oz, assiduously working the machinery behind the scenes, hiding behind our computer screens. So used are we (especially the Bebo generation) to communicating online like this, we can forget the reassuring calmness that comes from physically being with someone, the body language, the smiles, the shyness, the stumbling over words, the walking in step, the sensuousness of being in our bodies. When we are with each other physically, we know instinctively that we are vulnerable, and we take care of each other in a very different way.
The eyes are windows to the soul. We need to keep looking at each other, not our computer screens, or something important will be lost.

www.inter-actions.biz/blog/2007/10/cyber_system_in_the_mind_part.html
www.ted.com/talks/view/id/26
http://static.videoegg.com/ted/movies/RIVES_high.flv