Är cybervänner annorlunda?

Ännu en onsdageftermiddag med intressanta cyberpsykologiska funderingar efter en som vanligt fullödig inledning av Reflection Freenote.

Reflection Freenote: Seminars in Experiential Cyber Psychology: Instant Intimacy and Projection
Interaction with other people in the metaverse through the medium of avatar and chat is for many people a profoundly engaging form of communication and knowing.
In FL, we are very careful with strangers for the most part, and get to know people very well only over substantial amounts of time and share truly personal information only later (if then).
Since the development of deeply aware knowing of another person hinges on our ability to share intimate aspects of self, the fact that we are slow to do this in FL means logically that it takes a long time.
This is natural and appropriate of course, because there are many people in the world whose behavior and personality will not fit well with ours or with our created organic life-style.
So, if I happen to strike up a conversation with a stranger in a coffee shop (which most of us don’t really do in the first place), they may appear companionable enough at first, but all of a sudden something odd will pop out of their mouth.
Perhaps they have an extreme religious or political perspective which they begin to zealously pursue with us.
Pretty soon we are finding we are late for another appointment.
We are very pleased that we did not immediately give them our last name, address and social security number.
Indeed, this is just the conscious “tip of the iceberg” regarding our social defensiveness in FL.
We actually have many deeply rooted and more primal defenses which interfere with our engagement with “strangers” and which contribute to the vast majority of people being “shy” in interaction with strangers.
This has to do with the primal and unconscious defensiveness of our organic body.
That is we are hard wired neurologically for a world in which a strange human being was the most dangerous thing you could run into in the wild. They had big brains like you, and weapons.
So we are still primally careful around the actual bodies of other people, and it is the organic closeness of our body to theirs which reflexively causes this response.
So in lines going into a movie theater, people give each other space, and even if pretty tightly packed avoid touching each other or causing affront or problems. Very few people “cut” in line.
Not so in automotive traffic.
When encased in steel, that is when not in bodily proximity to other people, we are not as anxious and defensive, and tend to cut other people off, and be cut off with great frequency in traffic.
That is, we are less repressed and more open to our own impulses.
The metaverse is similar.
We are not in bodily proximity to others, and they do not know our names or where we live.
Consequently we are much less anxious and defensive and much more open to actually engaging other people with our thoughts and feelings.
For most people this leads to a more rapid emotional engagement with others, because we are essentially social creatures, and are designed to affiliate with others.
We can more quickly see the deep human and emotional similarities which we have.
We often may, in so quickly seeing this deep human compatibility (that we would actually share with most people in FL too) assume that we really do have a lot in common with this other person.
Projection can be defined as our tendency to project onto other people our own thoughts, feelings, preferences, perceptions and desires, especially as we are not actually and explicitly aware of the other person’s.
In the metaverse we can more quickly cut to the essential core humanity which we share with another person, but at the same time we are cut off from the rich tapestry of organic cues which would tend to fill in the picture better.
Thus, we can overestimate the degree of similarity which we have with someone else, or generally underestimate the significance of differences which do exist but remain hidden.
As we have mentioned cyberpsychology is a simulation of FL psychology which is simplified.
This allows for greater specificity of communication on a single frequency.
So like a laser we define specific wavelengths of understanding with enormous clarity, but may miss other wavelengths of information altogether.
So what have you found?
How does it feel to you to get to know someone in SL?
How many “friends” to you have on your contact list?
How many “friends” do you have in FL?
Is there a big difference there?
And are there lots of “friends” on your contact list in SL that you haven’t seen or talked with since they or you friended each other?
If so what’s up with that?
And with that I turn the discussion of intimacy and projection over to all of you


Apmel Ibbetson: hmm..I answer yes to all of them






Kandinsky Beaumont: The friends list doesn´t really make a difference between aquaintances and closer friends


Farbror IB skaffade sig en ny "vän" på dagens möte. Som vanligt var där många intressanta avatarer.








Och Apmel verkar ha fått en ny hemlighetsfull bloggläsare på kuppen.
Quintessential Sorbet: Jag märkte att jag var i din blogg Apmel