Off the line musings on online friendships

Man, says the sage, is a social animal and Agent Smith assures us he is a virus. Both ideas seem agreeable and we often see man aspiring towards that characteristic peculiar to a virus, 'immortality in culture'. Another aspect both man and the virus share is the tendency to cluster close together, creating unforeseaable affinities. 'Friends', my friends, is the name of the game, and making and keeping as many as you can is what it is all about.

In my schooldays, friendships were made only in playgrounds and backyards. Sure there was an occassional friend made out of a fellow-sufferer at the dentist's, but the more modern innovation of the penpal was something one in his real senses just frowned at. A friend, by definition, is someone who is there for you, someone you share the details of your life with; and a letter can get only so far in real life unlike in movies. The friend across the seas, a person after your own nature, someone to lean on in times of trouble and the first to rejoice on a happy occassion, was only a mythical beast the lonely had dreamed up. But all this was destined to change with the arrival of the internet and yahoo, among other things. Myth became legend, then history, and finally seeped into everyday life, as messengers carrying friendship-tokens became ubiquitous and smiles and tears alike were simulated and the mythical beast realised in a jumble of wires and machines. And people were hooked.

It was not entirely surprising given the near universal reach of the internet; but what beggars belief is the number of adherents the internet has found in all classes and ages. Kids who can't spell 'connectivity', and grandfathers who obstinately refused to give in to modern innovations like the vacuum cleaner or the washing machine, were alike into it and the net just grew wider and wider. The internet itself is a much huger proposition, but friendship got a new meaning within this context. People found new 'thingies' like the yahoo messenger and hotmail to make friends with and get to speed with others they had lost touch with. And it was a boon for all those who couldn't get to know their neighbours better as it was easy as a click to add another friend.

The latest craze, at least in circles I move in, are the make-a-pal-online sites like orkut, which are exclusively devoted to friend-making. These sites allow people to get to know others and keep tabs on what is happening with one's friends and acquaintances. They also foster in some people a new fever for number-of-friends and promote vicarious relationships where login-name and login-name share intimacies. The trouble, and this without malice aforethought I say, is that this new development weakens as much as it strengthens our friend-making abilities. For an old-timer like me, it is economical to have a few friends to offload my emotional surplus on(and receive that of others), but as the numbers grow bigger, it becomes difficult to maintain and cherish an unseen friend(though I indeed have many valuable friends because of the internet).

It is hard, I say again, not impossible; and often a flesh-and-blood friendship seems more 'real'. This is reflected in the logically sequent occurrence of online friends attempting to meet in real-life and continue from where they left off in the world wide web: a consummation, so to say, of the ritual began online, miles away from each other. Here the friendship-sites play to their strength as facilitators and catalysts to friendship. They function as forums where like-minded people meet and get to know each other - friendship is facilitated as people are encouraged by initial exchanges to meet and understand one another. And then a friendship is supposed to have begun; at least so it says in my ancient handbook.

Where the economics of money and time hinders an actual meeting, of course, these sites are the ultimate sanctuary. They open up vistas that are hidden deep in the mad superstructure of our world and connect people who cannot afford a 'real' friendship. They redefine friendship and make people like me sit up and notice that we inhabit a changing world: a world where the old dog has to learn new tricks. And in learning to adapt ourselves, we learn too that life takes its meaning through change.

Anyways, it is a fun thing and new(read cool). After the bubble burst, something had to come out of it all and I guess this is one direction that it was always predictable the net would take. Let what comes next try to be as successful.

PS : As a technical aside, I have been wondering if these sites actually tend to work towards their own destruction. Promoting the creation of a fully-connected set of friends, the records in the site databases must tend to grow as the square of the number of users if everyone tries to become everyone else's friend. This is only vaguely possible but a super-linear growth in space required to connect everybody seems a distinct possibilty. And I suppose the designers of these sites will have only a linear growth in space with users for reasons of economics, which means there has to come a point in time when there are more records to handle and not enough space. (A friend says space-constraints are no longer critical in the computing world, but I persist, as space and time constraints are interlinked and the scenario I predict is bound to occur as an asymptote with high probability).