Online profiles-R-us?

I love facebook. It's true; I love the way conversations can happen when I post on friends' pages and then their friends post too, and through our mutual posting we strangers become friends. Or facebook friends. Or facebook "friends." Whatever emphasis you prefer, it's really fun to meet cool, smart people I'd never come into contact with otherwise. I'm not so freaked as some people by the faceless nature of the contact. For one thing, when we interact online, we use the same neural pathways that we employ when interacting in real space (I hate the term "meat space"). But as many people have said better than I can, unusual things happen online. One scholar of the online interaction phenomena is Aaron Ben-Ze'ev.

Cyberspace is similar to fictional space in the sense that in both cases
the flight into virtual reality is not so much a denial of reality as a form of exploring and playing with it.
—Aaron Ben Ze’ev

Rector of Haifa University, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Emotions at the University of Haifa, Aaron Ben-Ze’ev is also the author of two meditations on emotions, Love Online: Emotions on the Internet (2004) and The Subtlety of Emotions (2000). I wasn't able to find out a lot about Professor Ben Ze'ev, but the titles of his papers and the focus of his books lead me to conclude that he is not just a stuffy academic. He publishes papers on topics such as emotional intensity; in my book, that makes him the kind of philosopher with whom one would want to have lunch.

Professor Ben Ze'ev maintains a discursive style that is rather dryly academic: I assume that this is to give his at times sensual and provocative subjects academic legitimacy. Indeed, in spite of the dryness, he can be quite witty at times, and he is extraordinarily open to manifestations of virtual desire. He is particularly astute in exploring the ways in which online culture is changing the social expression of humans' desire for community. He also discusses ways in which online culture is changing our understanding of intimacy: Ben-Ze'ev describes online romantic relationships as being characterized by "detached attachment" or "detattachment" (sic), because on the one hand many people become more intimate than they would if they met in person, yet at any point any participant can turn off the computer and walk away forever. Presumably.

From Love Online:

The Seductive Space:

"In cyberspace, people do not merely read or watch a romantic affair undertaken by others, but in a sense they are actually participating in it. As one woman says: 'It's almost as though you were reading erotica, except you are also writing the erotic story, and you don't know what's going to happen next.' Karl Marx once said that people 'make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.' In cyberspace, they can finally make it exactly as they please." (3)

The Paradoxical Nature of Online Relationships:

"In online relationships people can be partially or fully anonymous: people can conceal their true identity or important aspects of it. Anonymity in online relationships facilitates full disclosure as it reduces the risks involved in disclosing intimate information about oneself. People can express themselves more freely since they are more anonymous, less accountable, and hence less vulnerable. Because of our sensitivity regarding our loved ones, the person closest to us may never know our deepest secrets or desires. A woman may be nervous about telliing her spouse her sexual fantasies--for fear it may ruin their relationship. However, she may readily tell her online lover about such fantasies without fear of repercussions." (34)

Is Ben Ze’ev right? Are we in fact more attached and detached at the same time? I’m not sure, though it feels right, somehow. And it certainly seems to me to be true that virtual desire is very sexy.

I’m especially interested in his claim that online desire is different from other forms of desire, and that it may in fact change who we are in the world, when we let ourselves play with it. This seems to me to capture the essence of why we are involved with the virtual. Because we are all participating in the experiment. Because, on some level, we know we will all be changed by it. That's what we want.