My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #7, August, 1996

DOGS ON THE NET

I've been thinking about the famous cartoon with the tag line, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." In some ways, that is true, and it's why the internet is a model for how people should meet and get to know each other.

Because on the internet, we meet as pure mind. We find these minds in cybercafes, or in columns or other web sites, and we fire off indignant refutations or enthusiastic agreements to the people whose ideas we found there. We may join together in political action or joint construction of a curriculum project on the net. We are meeting each other at the level of the things we care most deeply about.

Had we met in the real world, would we have even noticed each other?

To begin with, in the real world, we have all those unthinking prejudices, many that we don't even know we have. Many of us automatically discount and disregard the elderly because we assume they are cantankerous and senile. We may discount the unkempt young as rebellious, lazy, or revolutionary. We eagerly befriend pretty people, and avoid those who are pitifully fat and homely.

There are so many minds we will never get to know because we have looked briefly at the package the mind is wrapped in and made a swift judgment-- too white, too black, too female, too handicapped, too dumb, too, well, NOT LIKE ME.

And basic good manners dictate that we will not overcome those instant prejudices, because we will not reveal, within those first few minutes of meeting, much of anything about who we really are. Convention says that we will start our conversations with neutral topics, like the weather, or pets, or family, or work, or sports, or cars. Thus, a lot of people may remain forever what Rupert Holmes calls "The People We Never Get To Love." Only if we are thrown together frequently, in a work situation, or a social group, or school, may we get to know each other and regret the hasty, initial dismissal of someone who turned out to be a treasured friend.

On the internet, however, we put out on display what we really care about. We might go hunting on Firefly to find out if there is anyone in the world with as eccentric a taste in music as our own. (In my case, the answer is no. So far.) Or to get recommendations for other bands we might enjoy. We might start a web site to advance a cause--home schoolers sharing learning materials with other parents, or AIDS activists working on a political campaign, or biology classes collecting data on wetlands and sharing with other biology classes doing the same thing.

As visitors to a web site, we feel that we know something important about the person at the other end, something we respond to in a very personal way. When we click on the little mailto button, we are addressing a stranger at a core of that stranger's being, from a core of our own. We have taken a radical shortcut through all the conventional meeting-and-getting-to-know-each-other ritual.

Do you have any idea how really odd this is?

I have e-mail relationships with all kinds of people I have never met. They are inherently unequal relationships, because you know all about me--in these columns, I have told you everything that counts about me. You know about my son, my ill-spent youth, my love affair with books, my politics, and all the things I truly care about. You know how I think. You have a certain level of trust.

You, on the other hand, the reader who clicks on my e-mail address, tell me damn all about yourself, at least to begin with. You tell me how you react to something I write. You may or may not tell me anything about how it relates to your own life. If I write back, and you write back again, we may start to find out more about each other. We may even become friends--who would not recognize each other if we ever met.

So when we say "Noone knows you're a dog on the internet," we're talking about meeting the mind without the packaging. But we also suggest that people can lie to each other about who they are.

That is certainly possible in the short run. You may be able to spin a pretty good line, put the prettiest parts of yourself out on display, express noble sentiments you don't actually harbor.

But in the long run, I don't think you can successfully lie on the internet, anymore than you can successfully live a lie in the real world. When you allow people to get to know you, your words start adding up into a recognizable personality, and the accumulated weight of those words will make essential falseness stand out. If regular readers of my columns, for instance, ever saw me make a racist remark in the column or e-mail, they would then have to question everything I ever said about myself; the cognitive dissonance would be too obvious.

Who knows? Romances that begin on the internet may be the most successful of all, because they begin by meeting with minds and hearts, around a passionately shared interest. But on the other hand, will those romances hold up when confronted with physical embodiment? When you find out that the man who shares your goals and ideals also casually shares your toothbrush? Or that the woman whose mind you love never ever shuts up? (E-mail, after all, is something you only call up when you are interested in seeing it and have the time available to think about it and answer it.)

Those are the kinds of things you find out early on in a real romance. Or a real friendship. The internet gets you to the core of personality a lot faster; conventional relationships reveal the day-to-day habitual functioning of people. Who's to say, in the long run, which is more important?

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NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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