Friends & Friendship

Of the questions raised in yesterday’s post, which I am sure kept you all awake and wondering last night, I’d like to address the last one first.  The question, for those who didn’t catch it or chose to forget it, was this: Can a real friendship be created via virtual communications?  I know the question itself may strike some of you as outlandish, science-fiction-like, not worth serious discussion.  But consider this: Just as strangers on a train, or plane, or bus . . . or anyplace they are together for a prolonged period of time and relatively certain they will not meet again, they often tell one another things they would never reveal to many of those they think of as friends.  Most of you have probably had experiences like this yourselves.  Or surely will.That being the case, it may be that anonymity enables truthfulness while intimacy — the holy grail of human relationships — inhibits it.  So we lie to our friends and confide in strangers.  Which calls into question the very idea of friendship.  But then along comes the Internet, the Mobile Phone, which in turn beget Email, Blogs, Virtual Identities, Instant Messaging, Tweets . . . all of which provide a level of anonymity the real world, the ideal world in which we only communicate face-to-face, cannot.   As I’ve noted before, I have yet to determine precise meanings for the words friend and friendship, which is the reason this blog exists, but being truthful with one another, I always assumed, naively perhaps, had to be a core attribute of friendship.  Now I’m wondering if even that most basic, even simplistic belief, is entirely wrong.Perhaps the virtual world of communications is a superior medium in which to develop a culture of friendship than is the so-called real world.Something worth thinking about.  

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