I spend most of my time engaged in virtual relationships. I sit at a computer screen and communicate with people who I email constantly, speak with from time-to-time via phone and VOIP, and meet face-to-face at best once-a-year.
I’m pretty comfortable with that arrangement. I’m used to interacting that way. I’ve been a long-time participant in online communities: forums, chatrooms, MMORPGs, blogs, Second Life, and the like. I know the general Do’s and Don’t's. I know to type carefully to minimize misunderstandings. I know to follow up sarcasm with a “lol” or “;)”. I know I leave an electronic trail wherever I go, one that is easily traceable and excerpted and cited and misconstrued.
The people I work for have a similarly long history with these technologies. But it never ceases to amaze me how they insist on being such social neandrathals just as they claim to be working on the cutting edge of these media.
I know that despite it being a virtual space in which we interact, that the bits and bytes emanate from another human being. I could never divorce the text from the body. The people I work for seem to all the time.
In my own life, I’ve found friendship and even love in online relationships. Through all the shit I’ve been through in the last five years, my virtual relationships gave me support and compassion that was at least as real, if not more than, that given by those offline and face-to-face. But in my work world, I repeatedly find vitriol and poison from online interactions. What shocks me is that I work for people who claim to want to further the field of education and technology; and yet with the very tools they extol for revolutionizing the classroom, they act like complete and utter fuckwads.
