The people on the other side of the screen

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I ran into someone a few days ago who prefers the name-calling style of communication.  As these things frequently unfold, the name-calling escalated when it could have just as easily have been derailed by a simple apology…or even just by leaving the conversation…rather than an obstinate and seemingly never-ending defense of the behavior.

Eventually, the person wrote the following, which is the inspiration for this essay.

I don’t [think] you should be getting so bent out of shape because of words typed up by some random people you don’t know.  I think you should take a step back and get some perspective if you really have such a hard time dealing with the ramblings of anonymous goobers on the internet.

I do not consider the people I meet on the Internet to be “random people I don’t know.”  I call them my friends.  That’s probably why behavior on the Internet means more to me than him.

I am a member of an extremely small minority.  Most meat-world communities with fewer than 40,000 people would be hard pressed to produce one or two of us, especially if we were required to be openly trans and still alive.  So when I came out, I went the one place where I knew I could find a community of people like me:  online.

I’ve spent the seventeen years since then participating in, building, and in some cases moderating similar communities of people like the ones I found back in 1992.

Communities of people.  Not “random goobers.”  The words you read on your computer screen when you go to this blog or any other are not random ramblings.  They were written by people.

I’ve watched people…my friends…live and grow, get married or partnered, have children and grandchildren, and sometimes get sick and die.  Sometimes they have committed suicide.  Sometimes they lost their jobs or their homes.  More often they reached out their hands to help others when it was needed, probably because those are the sort of people I am drawn towards.

I have traveled the country and visited many of the people I encountered first on the Internet and felt instant recognition when we finally met face-to-face.  I’ve driven from Arkansas to Virginia for Thanksgiving dinner with women from an email list and from Little Rock to Dallas to have a few glasses of wine.  I stayed with friends in Seattle when I tried to move there and was looking for a job.

I met someone who lived in Japan and we began a long distance relationship.  Our face-to-face meeting was in Hawaii over the Xmas break of 1993-94.  Although the relationship did not survive my surgery, I did recover at her house in Indiana.  And I grew a lot as a woman from knowing her.

I didn’t…and will not…say that everyone I’ve met on the ‘net was or has been my friend.  There are my friends and people who have not become my friends yet.  That’s the stance I adopted when I joined the Internet in 1992 and it is the point of view I have tried to maintain since then.

I know some people don’t get it.  They think online communications and friendships are not as real as what one finds in meat space.

That’s last century type thinking, it seems to me.  Our world has grown.  It is no longer limited to what we can touch.

Sometimes there have been friendships that were made and then dissolved through misunderstandings by one of us.  That happens all too easily in this medium, unfortunately.  One of the downsides.

But the interactions are no less real because of it.

You can choose to learn who the people behind the words on the page are if you want to do so.  All it takes is the effort to reach out.

I wrote this poem in 1993.  I think it still applies.

Art Link

Bits and Bytes

E-spacing

There is no sound but the clickety-clack of fingers on the keyboard

There are no sights but the electronically formed letters on the screen

But there are people in my computer

Riding the crest of the technological future

And I have joined them

We have stripped ourselves down to the thoughts we express

Mind meeting mind with no distractions

The carefully chosen phrase can be undone

By the carelessly tossed word

A misplaced comma may cost a friendship

We become our vocabulary and our usage of it

Our emotions are expressed only through punctuation

Yet we bare our souls to each other

And form relationships deeper than those in the real world

Because we must always trust each other

Finland, Australia, South Africa and Canada

Maine, Virginia, New Hampshire and Kansas

Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco and Boston

I have trod on your virtual streets today

And visited with some of your most caring inhabitants

We embrace each other thought to thought

And love each other’s wisdom

We share our joys and pain

And support each other through our sorrows and triumphs

This is life in e-space

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–June, 1993

17 comments

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    • Robyn on March 11, 2009 at 19:00
      Author

    This has been kicking around for a few days and needed to move out of the way so that I could write something for Friday.  It’s probably not exactly what I wanted to say.  But maybe it is close enough.

    • Alma on March 11, 2009 at 20:31

    Some people online know more about me than my meatworld friends.  

    We have the opportunity to gather with people whose interests are similar to ours.  

    I’ve been very fortunate to have been able to meet some of my online friends in person, but there are so many more that I would love to see in person.  

    • Robyn on March 11, 2009 at 21:00
      Author

    …in Orange.

  1. On behalf of humanity and its new tenuous connection over the innertooobz, I thank you.

  2. … and I am going to try to recall correctly, aka “Google”, in A Rape in Cyberspace (1993), Julian Dibbell writes:

    “I engaged in a bit of a psychological device that is called thought-polarization, the fact that this is not RL simply added to heighten the affect of the device. It was purely a sequence of events with no consequence on my RL existence.”

    They might have known. Stilted though its diction was, the gist of the answer was simple, and something many in the room had probably already surmised: Mr. Bungle was a psycho. Not, perhaps, in real life–but then in real life it’s possible for reasonable people to assume, as Bungle clearly did, that what transpires between word-costumed characters within the boundaries of a make believe world is, if not mere play, then at most some kind of emotional laboratory experiment. Inside the MOO, however, such thinking marked a person as one of two basically subcompetent types. The first was the newbie, in which case the confusion was understandable, since there were few MOOers who had not, upon their first visits as anonymous “guest” characters, mistaken the place for a vast playpen in which they might act out their wildest fantasies without fear of censure. Only with time and the acquisition of a fixed character do players tend to make the critical passage from anonymity to pseudonymity, developing the concern for their character’s reputation that marks the attainment of virtual adulthood. But while Mr. Bungle hadn’t been around as long as most MOOers, he’d been around long enough to leave his newbie status behind, and his delusional statement therefore placed him among the second type: the sociopath.

  3. I really admire your ability to reach out.  

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