Put your cyber arms around me...
"Talking is really overrated," he wrote. Here we were getting to know each other over the internet. The third in a series of ever-increasingly bizarre letters where each of us tries to outwit and outhumor the other. I write back,"If you disdain conversation than you are living in the right era. The art of conversation is dead. When the most popular way to interface and connect with one another is through electric wires and cables. When you can hide behind a computer. When television is the thing that binds all of us together, the great equalizer. When you can always just leave a message, a page, a voice mail, an email."
We like to be annonymous. I gave him my email address at work; he knows my real name; risks I have ventured. He looked me up on the company directory on the internet and got my phone number. Why? He's never called me. He won't, either, he thinks talking is overrated. Perhaps more for the thrill of telling me he has it. That he has made another breach in the illusion of annonymity. Likewise I have found his company's website and even found a picture of him. I tease him with this knowledge. We pretend that we are stalking each other. We pretend to be concerned.
But we really are concerned with revealing too much of ourselves, too soon. We pepper our letters with disclaimers and apologies like,"Have I revealed too much? :)" and "I hope this doesn't scare you away..." We lack the visual cues we get in personal conversation, the facial expressions and body language that tell us when we have crossed the line of propriety, overstepped the boundaries of good taste. We consider people who improperly reveal too much of themselves to be socially inept, or attempting to force intimacy. And yet how much easier is it to reveal intimate details in a letter! Precisely because we do not see, cannot gauge the other's disapproval or unease.
I dust off a witty closing and hit "send". Here I pause and step out into a sunny day, the air heavy with the salt of the sea. I wait in line for lunch and hear about my neighbor's son, a father in declining health, the latest love interest of a divorced father of two. All without a computer. For a moment we connect, not through a modem or ISDN lines. Not through satellites. Not through fingers tapping but fingers touching.
Copyright 6/99 Jennifer Chung.
All rights reserved.
Please don't stalk me.