11/12/01
The Electronic Fog Between Us

Ok, I was originally going to write something about chain stores and America because I went to Kmart this weekend and had the same vaguely guilty feelings about shopping there that I always have, and of course I always go back. But then something happened this morning that upset me - in the quietest most unspectacular way possible - and Kmart dropped to the bottom of my list of things to rant about. I don't want to go into what happened exactly, but here's a minimal background: Once upon a time, Chloe met Mr. X. They dated briefly and remain friends in that somewhat awkward way that exes can. Due to circumstances, most of the time that they have known each other they have spent 6-8 hours apart by car, communicating only via the modern-age wonders of email and Instant Messaging.

All right, enough of the third person. My point is this: Instant Messaging, and the whole world of electronic communication have made huge changes in the way we conduct relationships, not necessarily (in my humble opinion) for the better. Before the age of email, people communicated over long distances either by telephone or written letter. Phone calls, of course, are ideal. You have instant dialogue, voice inflection, pauses…aside from the body language, you have all of the elements present in a face-to-face conversation that help you interpret what the other person is thinking and feeling. Letters, on the other hand, lack all of the vocal tones as well as the body language, but their strength is that they are not an immediate dialogue. It is in your advantage to explain yourself fully in a letter because it could take two weeks for the other party to write back and say, "What?" Of course, it is easy to leave something out of a letter or write a barefaced lie, but for some reason (and it could just be old-fashioned sentimentality on my part) an actual letter is still more personal than the electronic kind, if only because it takes more time and effort to write and send them. Email, of course, is the modern replacement for the letter. They can be anything from the equivalent of a paper letter to a two-word note. The two things that they lack are the personality that comes across in someone's handwriting and the effort. As I said before, it takes all of 2 minutes (a little more, if your computer is an ancient dinosaur like mine) to send an email, and the potential for saying something that you haven't thought through and will regret later is much greater. I know I am not the only person who has fired off an email, hit the send button, and then regretted it less than a minute later (Did I really just call him feckless? What was I thinking?) The speed is an advantage sometimes, I will admit, but at the moment I'm talking about relationships conducted primarily via electronic media, not a quick note to your friend that your train reservation for next weekend changed to a later time.

Now to the real culprit - Instant Messaging. (Culprit, you ask? Is this a trial? In fact, it is. I am accusing IM of aiding and abetting the perpetuation of a reality-based fantasy - the worst kind there is.) IM is the electronic equivalent of a phone conversation in the sense that it is a real-time conversation between two people. "Talking" on-line like this has two advantages. One is that you can do it while you are doing something else, be it filing your nails or chatting with someone else at the same time. The other one is that it is cheaper than marathon state-to-state phone calls. The whole cheap thing is very seductive because it means that you can maybe talk to someone more often than you would otherwise. However, it also means that you tend to not call them ever, and through lack of comparison, you start to believe that an IM conversation is the real thing, when it is actually an illusion or shadow of a real conversation. What is an IM conversation? Words on a screen. And words, you see, are empty of meaning until we give them one. We do this through our voices, body language, and the context that they are used in. In our culture, we have built up a collection of generally accepted definitions because some words are used the same way over and over with only minor variations in body language and context. It is easy to believe that words are absolute and easy to understand until you encounter a medium like IM that is constructed of words alone. With no body language, vocal inflection, or even as much context as a letter - with only the one line before to use as a guide - an absence of meaning becomes startlingly apparent. Sarcasm, joking, and lying, for example, are all signaled non-vocally. Sometimes in conversations what we actually say and what words we use has very little to do with what we are saying, and we depend on our body language and inflection to communicate what we really want to say. In an IM conversation, all of this is lost.

Emotion is the biggest casualty of an IM conversation. Excitement, interest, boredom…how do we get these things to come across on a computer screen? It is for this reason that emoticons were invented: people realize that talking is hard without some way to translate the emotions that would usually come out in either your facial expressions or voice. But how effective are they really? There is no way to tell when a keystroke smile is genuine, faked, or sarcastic. It is infinitely easier to punch some keys than to compose your features into a credible expression, and it is easier to lie or mislead in an IM conversation, even unintentionally. In some cases, conversations become more and more vague on purpose, because you realize that you don't know if the other person is joking and you don't want to commit to being serious if they are not. Before long, your "conversation" is hopelessly lost in superficial sparring.

With none of the usual clues in place that give even infinitesimal grades of meaning to a conversation, it is easy to consciously or unconsciously pick the meaning or interpretation that fits with what you want to hear. The miscommunications can be tiny, but if you depend on IM to sustain a relationship (especially one that is not very long-standing), those tiny miscommunications and individual interpretations can build up until the two people involved have totally different conceptions of the relationship (this is especially true of someone, like myself, with an overactive imagination and nothing to focus it on). If they never talk other than electronically, it is possible for these misconceptions to remain unresolved, until one or the other says something unmistakable and then abruptly there is a realization that you are in two totally different places, like paths that started splitting a thousand miles behind you. The only advantage at this point is that you can conceal the shock of your discovery using the same methods that made the mistake possible in the first place.

Back to Mr. X and myself: a relationship ideally is an interchange, be it of information or emotion, with another person. Yet, over the months of electronic communication, the interchange was gradually blocked with mirrors, and ultimately 80% of what I was seeing was the reflection of my own words and thoughts imperfectly communicated and his imperfectly received. Words and cartoon faces could not show me what I needed to know, and so I replaced them in my mind with what I wanted to hear. I wonder how long X and I would have lasted if IM didn't exist. Would our interest have generated enough energy to call each other and write letters? It seems like a tragedy to me that ultimately we communicate with more facility on the computer than in person. We are two interesting and intelligent people who at one point got along very well. Whether the computer killed our ability to communicate, or it died naturally and merely appeared to continue in existence, like some species of undead, I can't say, for my perspective on the whole thing is shot, but there is no question that IM played an important part in whatever happened.

Part of me wants X to read this because it is something I could never explain to him, but it would embarrass me for him to know of the tricks I have played on myself. Then again, we have drifted so far apart, that maybe what would be best would be to wipe my mind free of our past association and start again as friends. Break the mirrors, as it were (I hate to let go of a good metaphor), like he started to this morning, albeit unknowingly, so I can yank my unruly mind back into the here and now from electronic fantasyland and learn from a present-past mistake. Because I have been here before, and I am tired of it.

Screw the phone bill!
Go and call your friends.

~chloe