Can We Be Internet Friends?

Today is one of those days when I don't have anything in mind to write about. I worked yesterday, so I put up another of my Pitchfork 25 posts. I'm next working Wednesday (it was Thursday but I got an email this morning asking if I'd swap days, something that almost never happens.) so I'll almost certainly use another P25 post for that. 

I love doing those posts. I'm pleased with how most (not all) have turned out but I realize they're not going to interest everyone. This used to be a blog about mmorpgs, after all, and I'd like it to go on being one, most of the time. 

For that reason I don't want to throw in a music post whenever I don't have a better idea, even though it would be a really easy thing for me to do. I can get one done in half the time it takes me to do a gaming post.

Also, as far as the Pitchfork thing goes, there are only six albums left and those are going to be far from easy posts to write. Two are done and in the bank but the last four are going to be tough. Four albums about which I have a lot to say but also four albums by only two artists, both of whom I've already written about in this series and one of whom I've written about many times before, including specifically about two of the albums in question.

Those are some of the reasons I'm not racing to finish the series but mainly it's because when it's done I'm going to need to think of another. Having this sequence of predefined titles and subjects, around which I've been able to riff with genuine pleasure as and when the mood takes me, has been both satisfying and exciting. It's allowed me to indulge myself in a way that makes the blog feel fun, while also efficiently stockpiling posts, something I've never been able to do in all the many years I've been blogging. 

I definitely want to keep that going. I just have to come up with another set of hooks. Another list to work through, most likely. Maybe several, so I can mix things up a little.

Before I started thinking about all of this I was going down my blog roll clicking on new posts in the hope of finding inspiration. That's long been my fallback position on days when nothing much comes to mind. And that's where I happened on Belghast's post, titled Friendship is Weird, at Tales of the Aggronaut

Most Mondays for quite a while Bel's been posting mixtapes he's made in a series called Mixtape Mondays. His musical taste and mine by no means match but they do overlap in many places. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading his notes on how he came to make each selection. I've listened to most of them all the way through, heard some new things I liked, some old things I already knew I liked and had my mind changed about a few things I was pretty sure I knew I didn't like.

I had been wondering how long Bel could keep coming up with ideas for these mixes. About this long, it turns out. As he puts it "the well has officially run dry." Instead of a mixtape, this Monday we got one of those revealing, heartfelt posts his blog is rightly known for, a musing on the nature of friendship.

I would hate for Bel to have to feel bad to write posts like these but as a regular reader I really appreciate them when they come. He has a natural, conversational style that make his musings feel very much like chatting with a friend over a couple of drinks. And, yes, it does feel like listening to a friend, which is kind of the point Bel's making.

Over the years a lot of bloggers I follow, most of whom used to write almost entirely about games and related hobbies, have slowly moved to include more and more personal material. These days it's probably the majority, including myself. Whatever we call these relationships we have, they can only be the stronger for it.

What relationships do we have, though? That's really what Bel's looking to define, I think, and as usual the main problem is one of language. Almost everything comes down to language in the end.

The last two or three decades or so have kicked up a whole flurry of new ways to communicate, some of which really have never existed before, even as analogies, in all of human history. We find ourselves needing to articulate the nuances while still tied down by the old ways of speaking. The old words. 

It doesn't always work. I'd say it mostly doesn't work.

Until we develop new language to express the gradations and granularity of the experiences there are going to be miscommunications and misunderstandings aplenty. It's not as though some of the language we're trying to use was all that accurate or effective even when we were employing it to describe regular face-to-face relationships.

 

Of all the difficult words the one Bel's struggling to define is perhaps the slipperiest. Just talk to any socially active six-year old and see how many kinds of "friend" they can name. As adults we may not be able to put all our friends in strict numerical order or keep mental (or written) records of which have been demoted from or promoted to "Best" this week but we still have close friends and work friends and old friends and good friends and drinking friends (okay, drinking buddies)...

So far we don't seem to have settled on either the terminology or the definitions for friends we know solely through a screen and a keyboard. Or maybe when I say "we" I mean those of us who grew up when that wasn't the way you "made" friends. I suspect any Gen Z teens sufficiently lost in the backwaters of the web to come upon this wouldn't have much difficulty in finding the language to express concepts that would, to them, feel as natural as breathing. Or talking.

Here in this corner of the blogosphere, we all grew up with the internet. Many of us grew up on it. Still, we did so in a society that either barely knew it existed or treated it with deep suspicion. All of us have made accomodations with the technology and for many of us it now feels natural but it will never feel inevitable. We were just born too late for that.

Which is not to say there aren't precedents, nor that we shouldn't be able to parse the differences better than we sometimes do. Does no-one remember pen-friends?

When I was growing up it was relatively commonplace for people to have "pen-friends". It could be someone you met on holiday or a relative who lived far away. Someone you'd met with face-to-face but with whom you now communicated only by letter.

That was one kind. Another, probably the more common, was someone whose name you'd been given at school, where such relationships were actively promoted, or that you'd found in a classified advert in a magazine. Remember those? Classified ads, I mean, not magazines, although it won't be too long before they'll be all but forgotten too. 

 

All kinds of publications carried Classifieds. People did every kind of business there but also they socialized. They met like-minded individuals for all kinds of mutual purposes, many of which necessitated meeting up in person. 

Meetings like that could lead to marriage or murder. Probably not murder so very often although that's what your friends would warn you might happen when you told them you were going to meet someone you'd met through an ad. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I met that way in the very early '90s. We haven't murdered each other yet.

The Pen Friend Wanted section didn't carry those fears or expectations but it had the word right there in the name: Friend. People corresponded for years, decades, without ever meeting up in person. It was something acceptable, understood, even encouraged. To have a "pen friend" was something you could admit to, even modestly boast about, in polite society.

I had one once. It lasted about two or three letters. It was in the mid-80s when I was reading Smash Hits, where they carried lots of ads from people seeking musically-minded pen-friends. I used to glance at them and wonder who would ever reply. Then one day I found it would be me. 

I was at a loose end and I thought how very cool it would be to have a pen-friend in America so I wrote to someone in California, who clearly thought it would be cool to have a pen-friend in England, since she'd taken the trouble to advertise in an English magazine. 

We wrote a couple of long, chatty, excitable letters. I sent her a plastic guitar and some other things because she told me she collected stuff like that. She sent me something I can no longer remember. I got her name wrong on the second letter I sent her. She still replied. 

 

She told me she might be coming to England. We talked about meeting up. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to. I imagine she wasn't, either. It's just one of those things you say. No-one means to do it. Or perhaps they do. You never know that, either, until it happens. I have an anecdote about that from my early internet days that's relevant but I'll save it for another post.

I have no idea if my pen-pal ("Pal", "friend", what's the difference? Plenty but we don't have time for that.) ever got to England. The correspondence fizzled out before then. It was one of those friendships not much different from those I had with so many people I met at gigs or at parties, then. The eighties - such a party decade! 

Just as on the envelope, in real life I got names muddled. Just as in correspondence, I saw people once or twice or now and then before we drifted away in different directions.

Would you call those people friends? You might, when you were with them. I would have. Remembering some of them now, because there are some I can remember, I still might.

We make the word "friend" do an awful lot of work. It can be everything from the person you'd jump in front of a bullet for to someone you'd find an excuse, any excuse, not to visit even on their deathbed. They're all "friends". Why should friends we meet on the internet be any different? 

I noticed, of late - and I mean just this year, really - without actually thinking about it I've begun using the term "internet friend" in offline conversation. Talking face-to-face with people about other people I know only through blogging or similar activities, I've been finding the need for a specific term and that's the one I've decided on, apparently.

For example, when my closest friend (Also ex-girlfriend, another complex relationship we don't really have the language for yet.) asked for a book on Bigfoot for her birthday, I linked her Belghast's post on his experiences then talked about it when I handed the book over. On both occasions I described the post as being by "my internet friend". 

 

When I mention Bel or Wilhelm or several other bloggers who come up up in conversation quite often in our house, these days I refer to them the same way. That's a change. Until recently I would probably have said "So-and-so, whose blog I read" or even "Someone I know on the internet." 

I still use that form of words for some situations but it feels inadequate when describing people I've known in some fashion for years now, whose personalities and lives I sometimes feel I understand at least as well as I ever did many "real life" friends from the past. For me, at least, the language does seem to be evolving.

Where it's headed though, I suspect, is just deeper into the same vague cloud of muddled meanings we already have. All I'm doing is adding another qualifying adjective to the already overburdened word "friend". 

I'm not suggesting any of my internet friends are necessarily people I'd share an astonishingly huge, unfeasibly affordable Manhattan apartment with (although I'm not saying I wouldn't do that, either...) nor that I'd drop everything to rush to their aid if the call came (although, again, not saying I wouldn't...) What I am saying is that I wouldn't necessarily do those things with "real life" friends, either.

The physicality of a relationship carries weight, of course it does, but physics isn't everything. Metaphysics matters too. And you don't get much more metaphysical than friendship.

Friends are whatever you want them to be, whatever they want to be, whatever they are. Don't worry too much about where you found them or what to call them. Just be happy they're there.