LET ME TELL YOU…

CYBERFRIENDS: HARD TO HUG BUT JUST AS REAL

Time was-a generation or two back-when your neighbor was likely to be, if not your best friend, at least a close friend. Back in the '50s, when most women still didn't work, neighbors dropped in for coffee and soon became close. A woman's other friends mostly all lived nearby, within a short drive. The telephone was a great means of communication, and a woman and her friends might gab on it for protracted periods (especially if she had small kids, who made getting out of the house a major production, most notably in snowsuit weather). But most of her socialization took place over coffee cake at the kitchen table or while shopping or sharing hairdresser appointments with friends.

Things started changing in the '60s. Partly it was the fact that more and more women were in the workforce. A woman's friends were still likely to live nearby, but now they were as likely to be friends from work with whom she chatted over drinks after five o'clock as neighbors she chatted with over streusel fresh out of the oven. But partly, too, it was the fact that our society was becoming more mobile. No longer did most people automatically settle down as adults in the same towns or cities where they'd grown up. And as people moved, they distanced themselves physically-but not emotionally-from their old friends. We got used to having a best friend who lived clear across the country, three other friends who were similarly scattered, and another friend whose husband's company was thinking about transferring him to Topeka, Seattle, or Scranton.

Cut to the '80. Things were pretty much the same only more so…and now it was often the woman's own employer who was talking about tranferring her to the DC office, the LA satellite, or the new branch in Atlanta. More than ever, we were getting used to having friends in distant places…friends we'd met in college, who came from (and returned to) towns far away from ours; friends who'd been transferred by their jobs, or whose husbands had been similarly uprooted; friends who struck out for another city just because they'd always wanted to live in Tucson, San Francisco, or New Orleans, or for other, equally independent reasons. And we grew more used to having friends in distant places, and to staying in touch by telephone (think alternative Long Distance companies, once Ma Bell's monopoly hold on telecommunications was broken) and by mail…and by such alternative means as "living letters," tape-recorded messages that enabled the recipient to hear the sender's voice reporting the news of the day, the week, or the month, without the (admittedly one-sided) conversation costing anything more than the cost of the cassette and the postage to send it. Much cheaper than even the most bargain-priced Long Distance services…and you could play the conversation back over and over and over.

And then came Email and the whole computer revolution. In chat rooms and on special-interest lists, in professionally oriented groups and on listservs for quilters, chihuahua owners, home canners, and left-handed flugelhorn players, we met others who shared our hobbies and interests, or suffered from the same health issues we did, or worked in the same fields we did, or otherwise belonged to the same "community." Not a physical community, delineated by muncipal boundaries, but a cybercommunity of people with like interests, or like problems, or like careers, or other like situations. And how did we keep in touch with them? By EMail.

Some of them drifted into our lives and drifted out again. But we formed real attachments to others. I have yet to ever be in the same room…or even the same state…as my friend Deb, yet I consider her one of my dearest friends. It's a friendship born initially of shared interests (I'm a writer, and at one time she was writing as a sideline), which at first depended on what we then just called "mail" but now specify as "snailmail" for keeping in touch, but the friendship really intensified when we both had EMail and could begin to communicate daily. With a long letter every morning, and usually a shorter one later on, we keep each other well aware of the ins and outs and intricacies of our lives. She lives in California and I in Florida, and so I've never cooked dinner for her as I do for all my local friends, can't invite her to my annual birthday party or Turkeyday feast, have never seen her home or met her boyfriend…and have never met her face-to-face (or "f2f," as we write in cyberspeak). Yet she is no less a real friend than Darla or Tricia or Rina or any of my other local friends. Nor is she the only friend who "lives in my computer."

Cyberhugs (expressed thus: {} onscreen) can't replace real hugs, and I certainly would be happy if Deb were to suddenly announce a move from northern California to southern Florida. But cyberfriends are nonetheless real friends, in a way that would have been inconceivable in the '50s. Then, non-local friends were often relegated to "pen-pal" status, and even those once considered close friends and true friends were often diminished in stature and importance if they moved out of town. We could keep in touch only by mail and the occasional phone call on Christmas or a birthday.

We often hear, "It's a whole new world today," and this is as true of friendships as it is in so many other aspects. Telephony plays a part: Some phone companies now offer flat-rate Long Distance, with which you're billed a set rate monthly, regardless of how many calls you make or how long you talk. And with most cellphone plans, though you pay by the minute if you go over your allotted quotient, you pay nothing more to call Alaska than to call your friend around the corner. But computers are at the heart of the friendship revolution. While some of the circumstances of life in the 21st century are cause for friends being separated by distance, other circumstances-most notably EMail-are cause for distance being no barrier to friendship.

Let the Luddites decry computers if they wish, but I have a computer "filled with friends," and I value them as much as I value the machine itself, and all the good it has brought into my life.

I only wish I could put my arms around them in a real hug. But they certainly are real friends!