Face-to-face friendship is risky. It doesn’t make emotions easy. It makes emotions into, well, emotions. An in-person exchange cultivates empathy because you are able to experience the whole person, the tone of their voice, the way they hold their body, the way they respond to you. It demands vulnerability — there is no “just right” distance available when someone makes demands right now. And without the benefit of editing, we are more likely to show ourselves as we are, not as who we want to be.
Online we can have attachments that are exciting and interesting. But part of appreciating their reality is understanding what they can’t bring us. Now that we’ve met a technology that allows us an edited life, we may come to appreciate that the unedited life is the one worth living.
Only Face-to-Face Friendships Involve Real Emotions
by Sherry Turkle
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/05/real-relationships-in-a-digital-world/only-face-to-face-friendships-involve-real-emotions
Online, we share stories and opinions; we give and get advice; we become infatuated and infuriated. To say these relationships are real is to say they have consequences, that online rejection can hurt us, that online affection warms us — and that is all true.
But to attest to the reality of these connections says little about the questions that count in relationships: How do they affect who we are as people? How we treat each other? What human capacities do they encourage or discourage?
Every technology has its own affordances and the online life lets us hide in plain sight. We can present ourselves as we wish to be. We can edit and retouch our words. We find it easier to be there for other people because we can titrate their emotional demands by keeping them on the screen. One college freshman shocked her professor, the late psychologist Clifford Nass, by putting it this way: “Technology makes emotions easy.”
What she meant is that when you move friendship online you get the benefits of a “Goldilocks effect”: You can have your friendships at the temperature you want them — not too close, not too distant, just right. And when you want to end things, it can usually happen without penalty from family or community. A 26-year-old, who I recently interviewed for my new book about conversation in the digital culture, sums up these new efficiencies when he points to the disadvantages of face-to-face friendship: “It takes a lot to risk having to sit down with each other and just see what happens.”
Face-to-face friendship is risky. It doesn’t make emotions easy. It makes emotions into, well, emotions. An in-person exchange cultivates empathy because you are able to experience the whole person, the tone of their voice, the way they hold their body, the way they respond to you. It demands vulnerability — there is no “just right” distance available when someone makes demands right now. And without the benefit of editing, we are more likely to show ourselves as we are, not as who we want to be.
Online we can have attachments that are exciting and interesting. But part of appreciating their reality is understanding what they can’t bring us. Now that we’ve met a technology that allows us an edited life, we may come to appreciate that the unedited life is the one worth living.
Real Relationships in a Digital World?
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/05/real-relationships-in-a-digital-world