A year or so ago, when one of my online friends disappeared for a significant period of time, I was working to track him down through mutual acquaintances. In the course of my attempt to gather his RL contact information, I found out that his significant other referred to all of his online friends and acquaintances as “imaginary friends”. I have always found that to be very clever and rather fitting, so I’ve adopted it myself.
It’s a difficult phrase to use, though, in many situations. When you start talking about “my imaginary friends” people tend to think that you mean… well… friends that exist only in your imagination, so I guess this post is made in the hopes of clarifying that a little bit.
In this internet age, I would be surprised if there are many people who are internet active and have not had imaginary friends. Those you get to know via chatrooms, MMORPGs, message boards, even the comments sections of blogs. It tends to be an accelerated getting-to-know you process, as anyone who’s done the internet dating thing well knows. Something about the speed, anonymity and intimacy of the internet just makes everything happen a whole lot faster. You open up and give people a lot more insight into what makes you tick, but at the same time, without body language and vocal intonation, they can’t get to know the real you, the whole you much at all.
Then again, there are people who can get past that. I have a handful of people who I consider REAL friends, even though they started off imaginary. In the several years that I’ve known them, our friendships have evolved to the point where we don’t even really use the internet to communicate anymore… however, I still have not met them in person. Maybe it’s a sign of the times, maybe it’s unusual, but I still value those friendships as much as the people that I see every day, or even every once in a blue moon.
I think that the telling point for me with the imaginary friendships, and the dividing line between this and the friends who existed only in imagination when I was 4 years old is that the online ones, every now and again can step out of that imaginary mode and into a real life one. I think it’s rare and it’s certainly selective, but it does happen.
Several months ago there was an incident (for lack of a better word) in an online community that I belong to. Basically, what happened was that people seemed to want, all of a sudden, to become *real* to the rest of the community. There was a flurry of exchanging snail mail addresses and people started sending each other letters, cards, gifts, etc. It lasted a couple of weeks, but there was a huge amount of participation. I do think that it served to make these people a little more real in my mind, but it didn’t move them out of the “imaginary friend” category, since there wasn’t a lot of substance to it. It was sweet and caring and generous, but mostly superficial.
I do think, however, that the drive was there. I think it was a combination of making ourselves become more real in the eyes of others, but I also think that there was an element of wanting the individuals in the community to be more real in our eyes and minds. I’m not sure how to put this well, and I’m a little concerned that some of the participants of this event, if they were to stumble across this, might take slight offense to the way I’m phrasing things. (But I think the only community members who read here didn’t participate in that gift/card/mail exchange.)
It’s not that these people aren’t real. It’s not that they seem plastic or fake or even closed-off, it’s simply a matter of the limitations of the internet and not being able to find that one thing that makes someone a real person or, to take things a little further, to consider someone “a person I know“.
But once I get to that point… the point of someone I know… they stop being my “imaginary friend” and they just become my friend.
Now you know.
~FG };^>