Guess I am on a blog roll tonight, my mind is working overtime and as usual I am going all thought schizo. I alluded earlier to the friendships I have taken from SL outside - let me do the rollup of the communication methods as a data point before I launch into my latest diatribe.

• BiggestFan: email & IM communication (frequent)
  
• theDevil: email communication (frequent)
  
• FratBoy: Facebook & Twitter (frequent but very surface)
  
• FratBoyUK: Facebook & IM (infrequent)
  
• Pepi: email (he sent one, I have not replied yet)

So five people, out of the ... I dunno ... 30 on my friends list (and that is after my frequent friends list purges). Anyways, recently I was discussing SL with my mother (eye roll) who of course thinks that I should run screaming from it and never ever look back. She fervently and with concerned tears in her eyes asked me "Why, why do you do this? What are you gaining there? Why can't you just stop doing there?" To which I replied that I had made some friends there who I couldn't just turn my back on. Her response was that those friendships were "false". To which I paused, thinking ... and responded - what makes them false? Her response was that they are false because you don't have that physical exchange with another human being, you can't read their body language, and you are only getting a part of the other person.

So this warranted some serious reflection for a few reasons.

One, in SL it seems that time is flying much faster - it is easy to fall in deep with another person very very quickly. I believe in part that that is because you cannot rely on the non-verbal communications that we use in face to face dealings ... therefore you are much quicker to divulge a greater part of yourself. In addition, it is easier I think to be open and vulnerable when there is still that comfortable blanket of anonymity. So how can a relationship be "false" when you are revealing deep parts of yourself to another human being? Because regardless on the other end of that network cord behind those pixels there is really another human being controlling that other avatar.... a human being with thoughts and feelings just like yours. Now, granted, that human being is probably 58, 375 pounds, and sitting @ their desk clothed in a Jedi warrior bathrobe - but who cares? You are still connecting with another human being.

Two, if a friendship fostered in SL is "false" then what about a friendship fostered via any of the online social networking sites? What about Facebook, for instance, where I have made contact through friends of mine with people who have like interests ... and we have continued to forge friendships independent of that other person. Or how about reconnecting with old acquaintances the same way, people who I was never really close with but through the magics of the interwebs I now share conversation with nearly every day (that's way more than with my own mother).

Three, then if an online friendship is "false" does that mean any relationship that starts online on say ... a dating website ... is then doomed to fall into that "false" category indefinitely? Or is it that the minute you lay eyes on that other persons face and see that they really were not lying, they truly are over 6 foot and under 300lbs that that relationship transitions smoothly into the "real" category? Isn't that, in fact, the true definition of shallowness? I mean, isn't it ideal to regard another person with love completely unburdened by the stigmas that come along with physical appearance?

Of course, in SL ... the physical appearance of ones avatar means a great deal ... so maybe that's what supposedly makes it false?

See how deep I am tonight?
hellz-tothe-yah.