We should also reckon as a benefit, in the realm of friendship, the Internet’s service to all of us rootless cosmopolites who are disconnected from our own past or who are looking for others of like mind or with common interests to share. In my own case, a boyhood friend, not seen in over fifty years, found me on the Internet shortly before he died, and he apologized in the ether for nearly putting out my eye on his home-run swing’s follow-through at a friend’s eleventh birthday party, a blow that left his silent mark on the face in my mirror ever since. A second boyhood friend emerged out of the ether, also after fifty years, leading to an annual sharing of a meal and a White Sox game with a couple of other guys from the old neighborhood. My best friend from grammar school, whom I had many times tried to find online, located me on the Web after fifty-five years, which resulted in a shared meal and wonderful reminiscences with our wives and his married children. Each holiday season brings many welcome e-greetings and photographs from old friends and acquaintances far away, as well as news of births and deaths, illnesses and recoveries, successes and disappointments.
And yet, acknowledging all this, one cannot avoid the sense that these benefits of the Internet are beneficial largely, if not solely, because of the artificial, dispersed, thin and tattered social world that is modern American life, perhaps especially among the prosperous and mobile. Being Net-connected is a remedy for the distorted and intimacy-shrunken – even if successful and thrilling – lives that many of us connected people lead. Paraphrasing Madison, the Internet offers a rootless remedy for diseases incident to rootless times. But the remedies are not a cure. Indeed, in several respects they embody and may even exacerbate the underlying disorders.
Actual Harms of Virtual Benefits
Several features of Internet-mediated love and friendship that are highly praised by its partisans may in fact be intrinsically corrupting – not because they embody ill will or stupidity or vice, but because they are formally and materially at odds with the deep structure and deep meaning of love and friendship at their best. I emphasize “at their best,” even though the best is rare and not to be counted on, because it is the cultural ideal that informs people’s actual aspirations and hopes. If people come to think that friendship is being “liked” on someone’s Facebook page or exchanging emails once a year at Christmastime, or if people think that it is normal to enjoy “romance” as avatars or in disembodied words and emoticons sent through the ether, it will affect what everyone understands and how almost everyone proceeds, especially the pubescent young who rarely know possibilities other than the ones ruling the scene when they are hormonally thrust upon the stage.
Please understand: I am not suffering from nostalgia or the foolish belief that we can turn back the clock. But I do insist that a proper understanding of the moral hazards of virtual intimacy could help some individuals to resist them, some groups to create more humanizing forms to facilitate the growth of true intimacy, and everyone to understand yet one more price we are paying for progress. Even in the worst-case scenario, should the Titanic go down, it will be good for us to have a song proclaiming, “It was sad.”
Here, then, are six of the alleged advantages of Internet intimacy claimed by its champions.
1. The conquest of space and place. The diminished importance, not to say irrelevance, of physical distance or presence, replaced by beam-me-up onscreen nearness, with you at my place and me at yours, is a great catalyst of emotional closeness. We can be as near as we can possibly be from the very first moment, because you and I are “occupying” the same spaceless space of cyberspace. Moreover, possibilities for friendship and love are globalized, and the whole world can be fished and trolled for intimacy. People can be friends or even lovers without being together, and without even knowing where the other is. Detached attachment, or “detattachment,” is a wholly new form of human closeness, especially attractive for risk-free nonmarital or extramarital affairs of the heart.
2. The conquest of time and unwelcome mediation. Internet communication is said to be much more immediate, not only because the speed and convenience of exchange quickens the pace of getting to know you, but also because there are no third parties or publics that can interfere in the one-on-one. No one has to contend with the critical eyes of family or friends; no one has to worry about what anyone else sees or hears or says. No strangers intervene to induce corrosive self-consciousness. It is unmediated and unobstructed intimacy, just you and I. In addition, each partner is sole master of the times for responding, and neither partner’s daily schedule is exposed to disruption by ringing phones, verbal importunings, or inconvenient synchronous appearances in the flesh.
3. The advantages of “disembodiment.” With no bodily distractions or exigencies, Internet intimacy can be mind-to-mind, soul-to-soul, and therefore, at least in principle, a more spiritual encounter. Carefully chosen words, the embodiment of pure mind and reason, carry all the weight. To be sure, the cues provided by nonverbal communication are missing, but, as a result, reason and speech can stand forth in all their glory: ideas, thoughts, witticisms, genuine questions, authentic and expansive answers, all composed at leisure, not under the pressure of someone’s gaze or desire to interrupt. Each person can have his or her say, at the desired length, without fear of opposition or contradiction and without being distracted by irruptions of the body, yours or mine. Physical investment being little, mental investment can be unadulterated. If only Shakespeare could see how the Internet eliminates all impediments to “the marriage of true minds”!
4. Directness and sincerity of communication. For the less (or more) than perfectly rational, the anonymity and safety of the Internet encourage people to be freer in expressing their wishes, their fantasies, their inner hopes and fears. The informality and casualness of all Internet communication is here extended to obviate the need for politeness or “beating around the bush.” Inhibitions fall away more easily, people can be more emotionally transparent with each other, fantasies can be shamelessly shared, explicitness and directness are the norm. There is less noise from outside distractions, less constraint from public norms, more opportunity to say and be who you really are, or who you would like to be, if only the world and your scant self-confidence would allow you.
5. Control and self-command. Because all are physically remote, and because one is ever free to respond or not – and to choose how, when, why, and at what length to respond – everyone is more in control of his social relations online than off. There is no sad face, no anxious gestures to constrain you, so you are free to compose your own speech while freely imagining the other’s response. When you have something to say, you don’t have to be listening or waiting your turn. A few typed words, or many if you prefer, sent whenever you are ready, with a simple click – your offerings are as much under your complete control as are your other online choices and purchases. And getting out is even easier than getting in: all you need do is nothing. Delete the unwanted message or refuse to answer – a clean break. As one cybersex enthusiast puts it: “The cool thing about cybersex is you never have to talk to the other person again if you don’t want to. It is a lot harder to do that in real life” – a comment, by the way, that illustrates Dr. Paul McHugh’s sage observation that men don’t pay prostitutes for sex, they pay them to go away. With online communication, you don’t even need to pay. It’s low-investment and low-risk, requiring you to surrender little if any of your autonomy.
6.