Emily Dickinson weighs in on whether internet relationships are real.

The Fourth Annual Fox Cities Book Festival is on this week, and I have volunteered all four years, although this year I was late to sign up and only worked at one session, which happened to be last night.  The session was called "Turn Up the Volume: A Riff on Creative Writing and Music", and it featured three different writers who incorporated music into their work in various ways.  Stephen McCabe was first - he would lay down repeated loops of guitar sounds with electric vibrophone or something as percussion and then read poems over the top of them; it was all very jazzy and beatnik and I loved it.  The last speaker was Bill Gillard, who read some poems and one story with themes drawn from his previous experience as a musician, including in the opening passage of the story the most perfect, moving description of a girl playing guitar (a Gibson 335 ES through a Fender Twin, to be exact) to make sounds in order to forget the boy she had lost, and also to remember him.  I went up to him afterwards to tell him that it was a perfect description of why girls play guitar - to make a sound that a boy made once.  It nearly made me cry when he read it.

But the one I want to talk about here is Ron Rindo, a Professor of English at UW Oshkosh down the road.  His thing is to set poems of other writers to original music.  Two of the pieces he did were Emily Dickinson poems, and to introduce one of them, poem 249 that starts "Wild Nights - Wild Nights!", he was talking about the different theories of her relationship with Susan Gilbert, the woman her brother had married and then they moved in next door.  There were many theories about this relationship and of what the poem was about, but he was in the camp that read it as a love poem, and believed Dickinson had a lesbian attraction to Susan Gilbert that was intense and passionate but also could never, never be requited.

Emily and Sarah used to pass notes between the houses, they lived next door but would communicate in writing, Emily in the end wrote more than 300 letters to Sarah, and he quoted her view that people in their flesh and blood were always disappointing, but she believed that in writing we are lifted up, and are our highest selves.

So, I thought, here is another vote for verbal relationships. 

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Seeing an academic speak and then thinking of commenting on his work made me think about academic work and its research and rigor.  These little pieces haven't had much research or rigor.  I do know how to write properly rigorous academic prose, supported by full reviews of the existing literature and fully footnoted, revised and refined over months or years, carefully argued and vetted for being an original contribution to the field.  My dissertation was rigorous enough that the good people of the University of California thought it was worthy of giving a Ph.D.  But here, I am working to put out these little pieces for you at a higher frequency.  I read other people's blogs and know they have worked harder to refine their entries, and these in contrast are going to seem tossed off and casual.  I just wanted to make sure you realized that I know this.  I guess what you'll get here are many swift passes through a subject, like many cuts from a rapidly rotating blade.  Eventually I should get to the bottom of them.

Are Internet Relationships Real?

Doing what I do for a living, I frequently get into that argument about whether Facebook is good for you, or if it's destroying society and ruining our youth.

A few weeks ago at a work lunch, when I was seated beside a co-worker I hadn't met before, I found myself in the argument once again, and this time I decided to deploy a trick I learned when I was a young philosopher of saying straight out, "I disagree with you."  But in hearing her side of the argument I realized that she was coming to it with a completely different set of priorities from mine.  In talking to her, I realized that for her, for something to be real it had to be physical.  She was worried about her kids spending too much time online because things didn't count as real for her unless they involved moving one's body around outside.  Sports, active pursuits like biking or going on long hikes, those counted as real, and those were what she wished her children were spending more time doing.

I argued the other side at that lunch, that internet relationships are perfectly real and not isolating at all, because you are conversing and forming relationships with actual human beings.  Once I realized her privileging of the physical, though, I realized how strange this must sound to her, since I have an equally biased privileging of the verbal.  I think it's true of me that for me, the only relationships that count as real are those where thoughts and ideas are exchanged in words.  (Hello there, by the way.)  Social media is built almost entirely on verbal interations, so for me its as real as real can get.  Whereas for her, because it doesn't involve bodies moving around, that claim sounds preposterous.

A few weeks after the lunch debate I attended a big social media conference, and found my bias at play again.  For one of the first times, I decided to install Tweet Deck on my phone, follow the hash tags for sessions I attended while they were going on, and tweet out my own summaries and perspectives on the meeting.  In addition to sessions with speakers and panel discussions, this conference also had lots of industry parties, paid for by different companies and usually held in some bar with some loud band.  Although I probably should have taken advantage of the networking opportunity, and although I'm sure I ended up missing some pretty good bands, I decided not to go to any parties, but just go home and catch up on the online discussions that continued each night.  The one party I looked into, I didn't stay long, it was just a bunch of people with matching lanyards standing around in an upstairs bar, and I couldn't work out what one was supposed to do there - there was no host apparent, no one making introductions or helping establish connections, nothing in particular to spark conversation.  So I went home and hung out with the people inside my phone.  For me, since I don't privilege the physical, just standing in the same building with a bunch of people didn't count as being together with them at all, if we weren't exchanging any words.  I wonder what my work colleague would have thought about it.