On Internet Relationships
Many of the philosophers who have written on the internet have argued that internet relationships are in various ways diminished compared to everyday, embodied kinds. For example, Hubert Dreyfus in his On The Internet argues that:
our sense of the reality of things and people and our ability to interact effectively with them depend on the way our body works silently in the background. Its ability to get a grip on things provides our sense of the reality of what we are doing and what we are ready to do…All this our body does so effortlessly, pervasively, and successfully that it is hardly noticed. That is why it is so easy to think that in cyberspace we could get along without it, and why it would, in fact, be impossible to do so.
It is easy to understand how philosophers come to make these kinds of arguments. Many important facets of our personal relationships seem to require face-to-face contact. Dreyfus, for example, argues that trust in another person is in part based on the experience that they do not take advantage of our vulnerability when given the opportunity to so in a face-to-face situation. Certainly it does seem to be true that we can have a level of confidence in people we meet in person that is not available in online relationships. Particularly, the opportunity for gross deception is minimised in a face-face-situation. The philosopher Gordon Graham, and countless other people, have pointed out that it is very easy to deceive people on the internet by inventing wholly imaginary personas – something which it is much more difficult to achieve in the non-virtual world.
It is for these and other similar reasons that many people claim that internet relationships are the poor relations of ‘real’, embodied relationships. However, one must be a bit careful before jumping too readily to this conclusion. One reason is that real-world relationships are subject to kinds of distortion that are at least partly absent from internet relationships. Consider, for example, the importance of physical attractiveness as a factor influencing the judgements we make about people. There is ample evidence demonstrating that we make unwarranted inferences about people on the basis of our perception of their attractiveness. For example, as a consequence of what psychologists call a ‘positive halo effect’, attractive people are considered more intelligent, more moral, better adjusted, nicer, more sexually responsive and more competent than their less attractive fellows. And, of course, it isn’t only attractiveness that influences the judgements we make about people. We also take our cues from age, sex, racial characteristics, style of dress, accent, social class, and so on.
The reason that these kinds of cues will often result in distorted judgements about people is because we make use of ‘implicit personality theories’ that rely on stereotyping. In other words, we tend to take our cue from these readily identifiable characteristics to place people into categories, and then we assume that they share the other attributes that we think are typical of the category. The philosopher Miranda Fricker has pointed to an interesting fictional example of this kind of process. In the novel To Kill a Mocking Bird, set in Alabama in the 1930s, there is a trial of a black man. The all-white jury genuinely do not believe his testimony, even though it is clear he is telling the truth. The important point being that in that culture, at that time, being black was a marker indicating – quite falsely – a lack of credibility. Not surprisingly, it is easy to find equivalent real-life examples of this sort of stereotyping. For instance, Rodney Karr found that gay males were rated more shallow, yielding, tense and passive than males labelled as heterosexual.
The significant point about internet relationships is that the characteristics we rely on to make judgements about people in the non-virtual world are largely invisible in the virtual world. The irony here is that it is precisely that facet of internet communication that makes gross deception possible – the absence of a face-to face-relationship – that undermines our tendency to stereotype. It is of course possible to overstate the significance of this fact. Even in relationships conducted entirely via the medium of the written word, we still make judgements about people which go beyond the evidence (especially if we’re talking about relatively casual relationships). However, it is likely that we do so largely on the basis of the actual content of our communication with a person, which, arguably at least, is more likely to be indicative of those aspects of a person’s character that they themselves consider to be salient.
The corollary of this point is that in our internet relationships we have greater control over which aspects of our character we present to other people than we do in our everyday relationships. Of course, this is why people worry about deception on the internet (and it is a real concern – the individual who adopts a false persona in order to procure a sexual encounter with a vulnerable person behaves badly). But it is only part of the story. If by controlling which aspects our characters we present to people online we are able to avoid the more pernicious effects of our tendency to make judgements on the basis of unwarranted stereotypes, then it is possible we will develop online relationships which are, at least in some ways, less distorted and more real than most of our everyday, embodied relationships.
Author’s Note: I wrote this about ten years ago. I think it was more or less right back then. But much less so now, mainly because the online world is much more like the non-virtual world than it was ten years ago. The growth of social networking, instant messaging, video, etc, etc, means that our virtual relationships are likely to be more embodied, and have more dimensions, than was the case before this kind of technology became ubiquitous. This has brought advantages and disadvantages as per the essay.
Category: Ethics, Philosophy, Sociology 6 comments »
December 8th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I agree in general with what you say. We all use different factors to
judge character. Some people look at the eyes, for example. Others watch the hands. I tend not to look at people: my father used to get furious because I didn’t look people in the eyes. I can’t tell you what color eyes my girl friend or my son have, for example.
However, I pay an extraordinary amount of attention to what people say, not to the literal content (which is often consciously or unconsciously meant to deceive), but to small contradictions, changes in tone, changes in intensity, changes in emphasis, insistence on one point or another, to what psychologists call resistences, etc.
I pride myself that I’m good at evaluating character over the telephone, and I try to get some sense of who a person is over internet. By the way, the way I judge character was not developed intentionally: since I was a very solitary child, I developed my own way of understanding the world and as I grew older, I noticed that my way of understanding people was different than that of most people.
December 9th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
I was a single child born 13 years after my parents married. I have always been content with my own company and have made few real friends. I always found friends more of a hindrance than a help. Notwithstanding when the occasion demands I can be sociable and my sense of humour seems to have some appeal to others. I remember my childhood very well and am often surprised when I reflect that at an early age say 3 upwards I was analysing the personalities of people I met mostly relatives at first weighing them up and making judgements. As the years passed I realised that my childhood judgements in that connection were, although somewhat basic, pretty accurate. I always found the world and its inhabitants an amazingly fascinating place, and still do.
Personal appearance for me is of equal importance as is personality, the latter so often being reflected in appearance. Amos refers to the Psychoanalytical term Resistances and I think one can only best detect these artifices on a face to face encounter with others, body language, facial expressions, and all linguistic utterances being of importance.
My reason for boring people with all this is to make the point that websites like Face book and Twitter etc hold no interest for me. One can say anything on the net you need more than words and pictures to form a true friendship. I spoke to a young man recently who told me he has 800 friends. An older lady of my acquaintance claims 80 friends. These claims I find preposterous, unless of course we have different definitions of the word friendship. Out of curiosity I had the opportunity to follow some dialogs of Internet friends. I was left wondering why anybody would want to say that at all, and what interest could it possibly be to anybody. I am of course aware that these sites can be used for more serious purposes but I ask myself why would I or anybody else want to know some TV personality had just arrived home and had a cup of coffee?
December 10th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
If we’re talking about people who are purposely out to deceive for the purpose of self gain, the internet affords far greater opportunity, in my mind, strictly by the numbers of people who can be approached.
For those involving themselves in a relationship, of whatever type, as pointed out in the post, the internet has its advantages and disadvantages, and I lean towards there being a greater possibility of honesty, depth, understanding, etc. in the internet type, for some of the reasons given in the above read. In a face-to-face, there just are too many ways of being thrown off the other person’s true presentation, with and without intent involved.
But when all is said and done, a look, a touch, a smile, a tone of voice can be worth an awful lot of words to getting to the crux of a matter.
I just read a blog A Decade of the Internet by Lili Ladaga in which her final words are:
“For all the Web’s ability to empower and engage users, there’s still something that you can’t download, Digg, upload, tag, tweet, update, or blog: a real-life, in person, human experience. Let’s hope that as technology makes the world smaller and smaller, we remember that the world is still out there — beyond the keyboards, servers and computer screens.”
December 12th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Were the participants in this blog together in a room we would probably be engaged with each other differently and perhaps say something different than what we have typed in the comment box. This is more a blog with considered responses than any attempt at rapid replies. I have tried chat rooms but it seems so artificial. But then so is this blog as a conversation. Some years ago i was involved in Artifical intelligence and philosophy at a post graduate level. One of the philosophical queries -one that stemmed from Alan Turing was – when can a machine be considered intelligent? When the person “interacting” via a teletype (pre screen response), was interacting with the machine as if it were a person on the other end of the line – then it exhibited intelligence. Some of the programs were very simple and relied on the persons willingness to go along with what they were receiving as replies. The intelligence of the machine rested upon a certain personal naive acceptance. It was something that Dennett called the intentional stance – a tendency to firstly make sense of what is presented, rather than question and doubt. We supply the missing frame.
Dreyfus was in the opposing camp and was anti A.I. – partly because its artificiality – its lack of a phenomenal dimension. It was syntax masquerading as semantics. I became disinenchanted with the AI perspective even though my task was supposed to revolve around enhancing a program of paranoia. I became more interested in the depth analyses of freud and Jung as opposed to a syntactic cleverness. Oh dear, didn’t go down too well! I went into mental health nursing,meeting “real” paranoids and the like. I realised the syntax was empty and content was elsewhere.
Well, you might say what has this to do with the internet? It partly accepts Dreyfus . However, (for me), this hiatus of syntax and semantics/phenomenology characterises many of the more severe mental health problems. The internet carries along with this phenomenological gap. As a moment in our lives that poses no real threat. however if we only have that as a way of relating to others it leaves a large gaping hole in our consciousness.
The neurologist Patricia Churchland has taken this sort of view to computer games which when they become models of social interaction leave human interaction as some sort of irritating interruption and / deviation.
December 13th, 2009 at 3:52 am
It was Susan greenfield, not patricia Churchland, see, for example
Modern technology is changing the way our brains work, says …
ID: The Quest For Identity In The 21st Century by Susan Greenfield . … what changes might long stints playing violent computer games bring about? …
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-565207/Mod... -
January 8th, 2010 at 9:02 am
I’ve changed my mind about online dating. But the roots of that change go back many years when a Kiwi bloke I know (a New Zealander, okay) met us with a lass from the USA while travelling. A lot of penfriend letter writing ensued. Then she visited NZ and a few months later, they were married.
These were not youngsters, both were 60-plus. Mature aged people who met each other after they’d both raised families. And they hit it off brilliantly.
These days the internet allows that to happen more readily.
And it’s not about a guy meeting a chick at the bar and liking what he sees. Done online, there can be (not saying there always is) a matching up of likes, temperament, skills, interests, experience, all that stuff… which goes way beyond what occurs in most social meetups.
So yep, I changed my mind. Starting a long time back.
Gary