Internet Emotions? What Are They?

Some of you may well realise that this post is based on actual experience.
Since you know that, there's no reason for me to allude to what it was, and so I won't. It's history now.

But it's based on a bit more. This is an evolving medium, and looking round, I see a lot of people are asking questions on this point.
In a sense, we're all beginers at this, it's a new medium, the medium hasn't found its feet, and nor have we.
Though maybe we're getting there. Day by day, I think our relationships with eachother online evolve, certain concepts are developing, concepts of how we see eachother are changing.

And perhaps we are getting wiser.

Somebody recently told me that my posts had got more interesting since I'd had to show the real me a bit more. Now in fact, there's a lot I always meant to keep back. Now, pretty much everything about me lurks in the archives.

And in a funny sense, now it's come to that, it is a weight off my shoulders. I don't have to hold back. I still have to retain anonymity, mainly, to protect my career and those close to me, but otherwise, I've nothing to hide.

Of course, that doesn't mean for an instant that you know me, or can EVER know me, no matter how many posts I write, even if I write thousands of posts over the years, you'll never really know me. And the same is true of you. I'll never REALLY know you.

It's the same principle that a photo rarely tells you what a person looks like. When do you ever see someone in suspended animation? You don't. You need to see several photos of someone to get any idea of what they are like in motion. Which we always are.

Now of course, this puts us in a funny position. Take Electro-Kevin. Over the last year, one picks up a lot about him- he's very open on his blog. But there are, obviously, things none of us can EVER know about Electro-Kevin, which, were we to meet him in a pub, we would pick up in a matter of minutes. His intonations, the way he stands at the bar, his mannerisms, his laugh. The REAL bits of his character, which would show the person he REALLY is.

The barmaid who sees Electro-Kevin in the pub and thinks 'Hmm, he's all right!', might not in fact like his blog.

Herein lies the problem. We're pouring our souls out here a lot of the time. We write with passion, enthusiasm, with emotion.
And often, that comes across.

And the power of words IS Erotic. Othello tells us that. We can come across blogs and be mesmerised, a person shines through that can captivate us. I'll be honest, more than once I've come across a blog, where, knowing the blogger to be female, one gets a kind of crush.
It's great. They're no more flesh and blood than the pin ups of Liz Hurley that you had on your walls as a teenager, but you can leave them comments, like a lovestruck teenager, and they answer back.

Let's be honest, some of level of flirting is an integral part of blogging. As of course, it is in real life interactions. I do it every day, with almost every woman I come across within a certain age range. Only on the internet, you can slip into delusion.

Because it ISN'T really flirting. It SEEMS to press the buttons, and we respond to it as if it is, but it isn't.

Because the real emotion you actually feel in this blog crush, ISN'T EROTIC.
It's platonic. Purely platonic.

The problem is, in real life, when we get that feeling, it is usually coupled with some desire to be physically close to that person. Body language, tone of voice, mannerisms, it is a whole person that we are attracted to.
On the internet, really it IS just a mind, and part of their mind at that.

We're just not used to such strong platonic desires, and thus, we wrongly label them in our own minds, as being erotic.

It is something beautiful I think, but we haven't understood it. We see a mind that inspires us, a mind we feel we connect to. And that isn't, in itself, an invalid connection. What IS invalid, is reading more into it than that.

Even exchanging e-mails, yes, you get to know a lot about a person, but not nearly as much as you THINK you know.
Even on the telephone, no, you don't know them- how can you?
In fact, speaking on the phone to me, would be positively dangerous. My voice is my best asset, and I have a definite telephone voice, low, lilting, seductive. It's my business voice, it is my flirtation voice, down the pub, it disappears, to be replaced by a far louder, more abrasive, coarser, Brummie dialect.

I know it's my best asset. My business voice has definite hypnotic qualities. I have learned how to use it over the years and I use it on the phone, without thinking. If I'm speaking to a woman, I just naturally slip in to it.

None of it, of course, is real. It's a mutual delusion. The internet allows us to cross barriers, to communicate with people from walks of life, we'd never otherwise come into contact with. There is a certain excitement, I guess at penetrating beyond the walls of a blog, and finding what lurks behind, in a world so very different to ours.

To put it in context, most people I know in real life, lead lives that bear some relation to mine. I work in a sector, which has its own codes of practice, which aren't those of other sectors. The way I lead my life, is perfectly acceptable within that sector. Temperance and sexual fidelity, are exceptions rather than the norm for salespeople. My friends are all fairly similar to me in outlook, the way we interact with eachother, the mores which we are agreed upon, are those we consider to be right. Not everybody in society would.



Most people who read this blog, lead very different lives to me. They do, it's fact.
That's the joy of blogging. When I have discussions with my friends, we tend to see the world, if not the same, at least in a similar way. And of course, we all know eachother.
That's why blogging is so much more rewarding. It's throwing yourself into the great unknown, and making some surprising friends.

And in a sense, they are real friendships. But they can only REALLY be platonic. No matter how strong we may think we feel.
And I think we don't always see this straight away. Maybe we have to be once bitten twice shy. Maybe one has to see the huge personal damage- to both you and the other party- that come from neither party standing back and being objective.

Oh, I know people are going to say that there are many internet romances that have worked and quote me a tale where it did.
I'm sure you're right.
But as sure as hell, the vast majority met and found they weren't meeting the person they thought they were meeting.

And that's not because either party lied.
But because both parties saw the other through a self-constructed prism. They saw only the words, or heard only the voice and their minds filled in the blanks.
Incorrectly.

And people will say that people make love over the internet, or over the phone. Cybersex, phonesex, etc.

Making love involves two people who actually know the three dimensional form of the other, desire to feel the warmth of their three dimensional form and unite.

Mutual masturbation at a distance of hundreds of miles is not love making. It is not even sex. It's a delusion. It's not wrong, anymore than looking at porn is wrong, but please don't glamourise it.

The whole thing is fantasy, and dangerous fantasy at that.

Dangerous, because it becomes a hope, and yet a fear at the same time.

The thing is, people have real lives. They have real careers, and real friends. They go to real parties, they meet real members of the opposite sex.
And you can't really expect to have an inkling of the real life of someone you don't know. For example, you know what I would say about how I see my friendship with my friends. You don't see them, except through my eyes. If you knew me in real life of course, they would be real people, with their own personalities.

And when these things go sour, they can go sour in a far more damaging way than real life equivalents. They can cause more damage for a start.
But also, there can be much more bitterness and anger.

I think, there is an element where people think they have been misled. And in a sense, they have. Misled into thinking that these things are what they can't, in reality, be.

You can delude yourself that you love someone you've never met, but you don't.
Not in that way. Platonic yes, romantic, no.
And that's where people fall down.

But aren't we all yearning for that special someone? And isn't it oh so tempting to think that that platonic connection is something more?
Because maybe, we do free ourselves and open ourselves up to forming platonic connections in a way we don't so often in real life. We're more guarded, less trusting.

I think what we find here, is that actually, we end up quite liking people we wouldn't give ourselves time to get to know in real life.

But would we like them in real life?

I guess maybe, we don't really always need to know the answer, and maybe we shouldn't push the question too far sometimes. Maybe we should accept the beauty that exists in the way we interact as avatars.
And when we e-mail eachother, just accept that for what it is too, two minds, sharing thoughts. In itself, that does mean something.

It's perhaps a new kind of friendship, a new kind of relationship that defies our preconception of categorisation.
And maybe, in trying too hard to find terms for these connections, we force them into boxes they don't really fit in.

I suppose, in a sense, of all the regret I might personally feel for the situation that happened to me, the saddest part was to realise just how much someone hated you (still hates, I think). To realise that someone who you thought kind of got you, was now drifting deeper and deeper into a falser and falser picture of you, based on the fact that really, none of you had ever really known eachother in the first place. And now the gaps that had once been filled in, in the best light, were refilled in, in the worst light.
And yet somewhere, in the innermost recesses of my heart, was a faint tingle remembering a conversation about Nietzche. Somewhere, in all that debris, was a platonic friendship lost. And I always regret the loss of a friend.

I think one can develop deep and meaningful friendships with people through this medium. I have mentioned before how important one of my online friendships is to me, and it is important to me, very important. I understand the dynamics of it far better than once I would have done. There is no conceivable way I would see her in anything other than platonic terms, and vice versa. She's- very sweet, I guess that's really all I can say, and that's probably all there is to say really. She cheers me up. She adds to my life, in a good way.

I think for so long, our society has downplayed the importance of platonic friendship. I think here we are discovering it's beauty again, we are making friends, valuable friends, in a way not tangible in real life. They are just different to our real life friendships. But not necessarily less meaningful.

But they can't be romantic. And we can't fool ourselves they are.



For romance, really, you have see them walk, hear them talk. You have to see them in 3D and want to hold them tight, to caress their cheek, feel their breath on your neck.

We have such potential here, we really do, in forming personal interconnections in a wholly new way.
Blogging is amazing, it really is.

And those of you I consider my friends (Those of you who receive e-mails with my name at the bottom), I love you all to bits (PLATONICALLY!!!!!!).

But Romance.
Let's start getting real, people get hurt.

When two people look into eachothers eyes and their pupils dilate, their arms touch and they slowly move towards eachother, when their lips slowly press against eachothers, when their hearts are fluttering like a butterfly, when the taste of the other's lips is sweet as strawberries, THAT'S romance.

And THAT only happens in real life.