Relationships in the Digital Aether

I've lost count of how many times I've had this type of conversation over the internet or on Facebook:

Distant friend: *comments on my photo* 

Me: "That's so true! Also by the way, I miss you :)"

Distant friend: "Me too! We HAVE to hang out sometime!" 

Plans for definite future socialization are confirmed, usually all in the span of five minutes, never to be followed up on again. 

Let me clarify. Usually if it's a close friend, we find some way to make plans. However, it's those friends from summer programs, those digital acquaintances with which hollow promises are made in the facade of a close friendship. 

This has been an ongoing trend that I've noticed. Based on my totally-not-statistical observations, many people I know (including myself, sometimes) tend to act more outgoing, more effervescent over the internet than we are in real life.  We are quicker to compliment. We are quicker to send out hearts emojis than give hugs in real life (except me--I'm probably one of the most open huggers you'll find). We are bolder, more daring, quicker to reach out and show affection and feign a closeness that would take maybe days or weeks to manifest in real life. I've met many friends that seemed confident over the internet, only to be more withdrawn and less open in real life. 

This doesn't just affect friendships as well--this affects relationships, too. A New York Times Modern Love essay a couple of years back touched on this subject, when a girl who fell in love with a guy she'd met at a digital internet conference developed an incredible relationship with him over Skype worked to meet up with him in real life, only to discover that he was closed off, hesitant, and ignorant of her. In real life, it turned out that he valued his digital presence and his image rather than the actual relationships he had with people around him. 

I wonder what boldness and intrepidness takes place over the ambiguous digital interwebs that can't translate to real life. Is it that the stakes are higher in real life--that spending time in each others' physical presence forces a commitment that doesn't have to be held over the internet? (In the internet, all it takes is to ex out of a chat box or not respond to a message--in real life, we can't just leave) Is it that we have a longer time to polish what we have to say over the internet? Or does what we have to say over the internet hold less weight, and therefore we can exaggerate emotions, connections, and friendships? 

One thing is for sure--the internet makes it easier for us to say things. But does that make us more truthful about our feelings, or does it give us more space to lie? 

Nature and Technology

When I was five years old, my dad, fearing I would get lost in the golf course and nature preserves that made up my backyard, pressed a compass and an area map to my hand and told me to familiarize myself with my surroundings. With nothing better to do (and dreading the alternative of being locked in my house all day with nothing but mindless cartoons), I set off through those paths and thickets, finding my way around the trees and shrubs, differentiating my landmarks by the type of trees in that area or by the unique assortment of pockmarked rocks.

It was nothing impressive, being the queen of my little vacant golf course-and-forest domain, but it was something. With that knowledge, I began to find my way around my neighborhood subdivision, swapping rocks and trees for neat, wide, concrete sidewalks and steeped-roofed houses.

Knowledge of nature was something innate, something that could only be truly learned through firsthand, visceral experience. And yet, sometime between then and now, I had lost it.

When I was about to back out of the garage the other day and reached out to turn on my GPS, I paused for a moment. Looking down my driveway, I realized that I had used my phone’s GPS every single day in the past four days—and that without it, I would be utterly lost. Hit with a sense of nostalgia and wanting to be able to navigate my way to Skokie as easily as I had navigated my neighborhood growing up, I began to realize that in that the ability to navigate myself around nature, once a predominant part of my childhood, was now one step removed from my life—and that technology had somehow filled that gap.

Does technology remove us from nature? I’m not sure. On one hand, technology helps us map places, categorize wildlife, and see gorgeous natural settings that would have been nearly impossible to see without the help of a camera and the internet. But on the other hand, I realize that in our quest to use technology to figure out nature, we’ve removed ourselves from it. This TIME article emphasizes naturalists’ fears that the middle-aged ecologists—the ones trained before the advent of technology—were perhaps the last generation to fully and truly experience themselves in wildlife—and not just in the technological knowledge of it. As wildlifers spend more time analyzing nature in front of a computer and less time actually in nature, it might diminish their true familiarity with their field.

Technology helps us know nature and our surroundings. But I fear that in our quest to know and not to experience, we are taking nature away from ourselves.