The bridges are different than they’ve ever been.
Tonight, when I needed an ear - just a friendly contact with another human I liked - I reached out to someone I’ve yet to meet. Because his face was friendly and familiar, and he’s become comfortable to me.
I think that’s an increasingly common phenonmenon, and for those of us that spend a good deal of time online, more prevalent than ever. The definition of “stranger” has totally changed.
It used to be that a stranger was someone you’d never met. But that just doesn’t suffice anymore, does it? Perhaps the better questions is asking what “meet” means today. I’ve had thousands of conversations across the web, phone, video, email, instant message…and yet, many of these people feel more in tune with me - with my person - than people I’ve “known” my whole life.
We were once confined by our geography and the range of our travels to find the people that made up the fabric of our relationships. We met people through sweeping commonalities - school, work, neighborhood, mutual friends - and it was chance to connect with someone who shared (I mean really shared) anything about who we were.
If you were anything like me, you often wondered if there was anyone who shared anything like who you were.
But I’m not a slave to my physical space anymore. I still very much cherish live human contact. There is no replacement for that to me, not ever. But there is instead a new presence of people, somewhere between “I know you” and “I’ve met you” that really, truly matters. That makes it okay to reach out to someone when you’ve not yet shared a room with them, if only because you know that through all that aether, they might just not be a stranger after all.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Rosy 03.07.09 at 3:37 am
Amber, this is a lovely post and very true! Thank you!!!
Aurelie 03.09.09 at 4:53 am
I love how the Internet has allowed people whose paths would never have crossed in real life to “meet”… It’s so easy to become biased because of appearances or for even sillier reasons (”he came with so-and-so at the party so he must be a snob like her.”)
I also appreciate how blogging makes preliminaries unnecessary. You can simply say through the blog: this is how I am, and if you have a problem with that, just go and browse another webpage. There’s a sense of authenticity that you just don’t get when you meet someone for the first time and go through all the “where do you work and how long have you been living in the city?”