One of the aspects of online sociology that most interests me is the anonymity/troll effect, wherein otherwise (outwardly) reasonable people become complete assholes on the internet because they can hide behind a handle and not share their real name or contact information. This seems to suggest that people are, at their cores, ignoble savages, restrained only by the seeming Leviathan of tact, courtesy, and accumulated folkways that we’ve picked up after years of painstaking habituation.
Or, more bluntly: people are, fundamentally, all complete dicks, and only superficially aren’t.
Anyway, as someone who used to play World of Warcraft, the troll effect is something I’ve experienced firsthand on a number of occasions. But, lately, I’ve realized that there’s another side to the anonymity effect: the internet is also great for those conversations you can’t manage to have in person; see also, “The Talk.”
A friend recently e-mailed me a copy of her Talk with a newly-acquired boyfriend, which apparently took place over AIM. Following the transcript, she wrote, “This whole conversation happened online because that’s the only place he really feels comfortable talking… which is really weird for me.” And, come to think about it, it would be really weird to have, as a 21 year old, a serious and emotional conversation via gchat.
But that doesn’t mean that my natural inclinations don’t lean in that direction. As I wrote about in “The Talk,” I loathe having emotionally-charged conversations in person, for reasons that I can’t quite determine. For a while, I’ve been brushing it off as me being fundamentally uncomfortable with emotions, period, but I think a more nuanced understanding is needed: it’s not that I’m afraid of telling people how I feel; it’s that I’m afraid of telling them that in person. Or, put another way, I don’t think that I’d have failed three nights in a row to initiate The Talk if I were willing to have it over Messenger.
This all seems to ring a little childish, though. The first guy I was ever involved with, my freshman year of high school when I was the ripe age of 15, was a relationship that took place primarily over MSN Messenger. (This, I think, was mostly because neither of us could drive.) And, it turns out, emoticons are a poor substitute for emotions, as I no longer speak with the guy in question, and am actually repulsed that I came in physical contact with him every time he shows up in my Facebook News Feed. (He may have been defrienestrated. Not certain.) I proceeded to make the emoticon-for-emotions mixup again my junior year of high school. And each time, I had to relearn the painful truth that feeling something in ASCII and feeling something in person are very different concepts.
Now, though, I’m left wondering whether the “weirdness” that both my friend and I feel re: the prospect of The Talk over IM is residual skepticism left over from the heady days of chat rooms, Napster, and AltaVista, or something objectively wrong with that idea. What, in the end, is actually the problem with having The Talk online? Isn’t good communication still functional, relationship-ey communication if it’s happening over the internet?
Yeah, I’m not convinced either. But I’m not sure why.