I read this article today. And, of course, also signed up with an account at "The WIP." Kinda ironic I suppose given what the article is about and how I feel about it.

But, I think Handen puts her finger on something that is all-too-true. Certainly in my life. Although I also find myself pulling away from that: coming here less, going to Facebook less, trying more and more to see and be with real-life friends and involving myself in human relationships without the more-or-less unreal interface of the webz.

I sometimes wonder, though, if my children will be able to find the same spaces I once found to develop friendships. My oldest son constantly texts his friends. That's their main communication. Although the set-up of his school means that his fellow students are all over NJ when they go home and none live remotely close to him. So, I suppose there's that aspect that he has to deal with that's not easy.

My youngest child is very gregarious. Something deep within him seems to yearn to be in-touch consistently with others. But, even then his desire for "a cell-phone I can text on" trumps most of his desires for now, at 11.

People have never lived well without real contact. Getting to know other real people who are close enough to touch, hug or even fight physically. Now we develop so many "friendships" that are over great distance and with people we never actually sit or stand with, touch with our tactile sense.

There are positives to that communication across distance. We meet and experience at least vicariously others and their different waays of seeing and experiencing the world and that's not a bad thing. But I sometimes find myself longing to be among real people, many of them living across the country or on the other side of the world. People I have come to care about without ever even shaking hands with or greeting with a hug.

I wonder if it doesn't become easier to involve ourselves with the Ray Andrades of the world, especially for people with transsexing histories who are often averse to actually doing much more than going to work and then hanging at home where we feel "safe?"

"Safe" but all alone too often. Often closed into our shells so that the loss of a webz confidante (I saw this fairly recently here where a member was despairing because she felt she had "driven away" someone she'd come to rely on here. I thought at the time that she hadn't driven the other away, but that the desire of the other to never have her TS history revealed was what caused the abyss to open in the relationship.) becomes devastating.

I have no answers I suppose, except the ones I prefer for myself. You'll see less of me than you already do around here I imagine. My Facebook account will lie unused for days on end I hope. I want to be able to touch real people and their lives. I want them to be able to touch mine.

What's the point of transitioning and then spend time on-line to the exclusion of everyone else. We are mostly lonely people, desiring friendship and relationship and all-too-often the only way we can find it is not meeting the person next-door or down-the-street or across town, but, instead, finding another person in pixels and electronic streams of waves and particles.

Life is so much more and human capacity is so much more stretched and enriched by human touch.

I feel like I have come to love so many of you. Not all come around anymore. But, it's more important to cultivate the people I can actually touch and know.

Nichole

It's a very good article, I read it with great interest, and sent it off to several friends.  Years ago now an educator name of Neil Postman wrote about how we were amusing ourselves to death, and in that everything - murders, weather, economics all became some sort of game we were watching.  Now, in a text/Twitter world if you can't express an idea in 140 words or whatever, you can't communicate it.  So goes the course of empire. 

I think that's why I've never done chat, or facebook, or any of that.  I like the BB like this because I can take them on my own time, and respond when I feel like it rather then the instant deal that all too often leaves little room for either reflection or grammar. 

What we miss, as Nichole points out so well is any grounding in reality.  We had this little debate prior to these posts about judging people based on how they look and all that, and I think Nichole is right that in that 'safe environment' of home as womb wrapped in our electronic cocoon we space out what we would know right off on the street - or worse, we never learn it in the first place.

That's why I love to walk, to ride my bike, to measure the world in human scale.  It's also why I love my work, which is very much about people, all sorts of people, different ones all the time.  I often notice that people who go out a lot are very different from those who don't.  They are capable of meeting new people, incorporating new ideas, and I think see the world as both a lot less frightening but also as someplace with very real dangers.   

Quote from: Nichole on April 17, 2009, 09:45:22 AM
I wonder if it doesn't become easier to involve ourselves with the Ray Andrades of the world, especially for people with transsexing histories who are often averse to actually doing much more than going to work and then hanging at home where we feel "safe?"

Sadly, this applies to me in a big way Nichole.  I deal a lot with depression, and over the last few months it's gotten worse.  I tend to just go to work, come home and eat and sleep, and spend time on the computer and watching TV, because it's "safe" and familiar.  I don't go out alone, and since all my friends are still in school, they don't have time to see me.

I went home this past weekend to visit my mother for Easter, and it really helped my emotional well-being by getting away from the computer and the cellphone for a few days, and just being with another person.  How do we begin to break this vicious cycle, to get out there and interact with others?  Otherwise, (especially for trans people), what was the point in transitioning?

Aww Nikki, you've touched me in a lot of ways better than 'real people' have.
It does suck though, when it'd be great just to shake your hand or hug or have coffee.

Quote from: Nero on April 17, 2009, 11:50:50 AM
Aww Nikki, you've touched me in a lot of ways better than 'real people' have.
It does suck though, when it'd be great just to shake your hand or hug or have coffee.

I agree, Nero. As it would for me to be able to do the same with Kat and Fae, Karen, Dennis, Tink, Zythyra, Rebis, Hypatia, Amanda Alway, and on and on of people I have "met" here and elsewhere on the webz.

But to be honest, getting to know Tina and Christine, Jeannette, Natalie, Nathaniel, Yvette and Phyliis, Jeanne Marie, Tim, Maggie, Catherine, and Robin who all live, with one exception, within 15 miles of me and who I do see regularly is even more important, I think, to my well-being.

It's not so much that one cannot come to love people she meets on the webz and have them be important to her and have been and to be confidantes and back-patters when she needs it. Just that when I want a hug from you, Zythyra, Kat or Dennis that one I can feel and smell, even taste would be eversomuch more fulfilling than the virtual ones you guys have given and I have appreciated so very much.

Nichole

O, to have so many of you closer to hand

O, to have so many of you closer to hand

Well you could move, better weather out here at least.  LOL.

But communication is something that can occur in different ways, and on different levels.  I think what the author was really talking about was using technology to replace human contact in the day to day world. i.e. I'm not talking to the person next to me on the bus because we both have our walkthings or iThings on.  Of course I could have read it wrong.

No, I think you do have it right, but sometimes I see that becoming all-encompassing, so to speak. That place where we find it "safer" to remain technologically tied together rather than using, as you said earlier, those other skills that we often neglect on the webz (how many times have you "heard" on a board someone saying something rather harshly to someone else and then writing that the medium itself is flawed because you "didn't hear my nuance" or "read my body language?")

Duh, use your words more efficiently then so some meaning comes through without expecting me to see what I cannot. You adjust yourself to the medium and others, you cannot expect them to adjust to the absences they cannot make appear by will.

Exactly so, and when we are so tied to such things all-day-every-day I think those talents we might have had for "reading" others become atrophied. So, someone like Angie Zapata "sees" Ray Andrade, but given her desperation (perhaps) to "be accepted as I am" and the fact that this guy seemed willing to do so and "seemed nice over the webz" in his replies at the Mojo-site maybe she disconnected some of the very things in her that we've written about on the "judging people by their looks" discussion.

That's (not doing so) seems a positive way ideally, but as we both know the real-life aspects of allowing such ideals to control one's "sense of things" can be deadly. "O, those guys just look bad hangin' on that street corner at 3 a.m. I should be able to walk right through them w/o any problem." (OK, maybe that is a rather oultre example. But you do understand what I mean I am reasonably sure.

In a world of pixels real discrimination between safe and unsafe, positive and negative is perhaps not as well-honed as it may be irl. And to be tied constantly to electronic media of all kinds seems to me quite a negative when it comes to the ways I use discrimination to decide where and with whom I'll go.

So, yes, my essay and her's intersect, but they don't parallel each other.

Nichole

Quote from: Nichole on April 17, 2009, 12:01:27 PM
I agree, Nero. As it would for me to be able to do the same with Kat and Fae, Karen, Dennis, Tink, Zythyra, Rebis, Hypatia, Amanda Alway, and on and on of people I have "met" here and elsewhere on the webz.

But to be honest, getting to know Tina and Christine, Jeannette, Natalie, Nathaniel, Yvette and Phyliis, Jeanne Marie, Tim, Maggie, Catherine, and Robin who all live, with one exception, within 15 miles of me and who I do see regularly is even more important, I think, to my well-being.

It's not so much that one cannot come to love people she meets on the webz and have them be important to her and have been and to be confidantes and back-patters when she needs it. Just that when I want a hug from you, Zythyra, Kat or Dennis that one I can feel and smell, even taste would be eversomuch more fulfilling than the virtual ones you guys have given and I have appreciated so very much.

Nichole

O, to have so many of you closer to hand

I wish we lived closer too sis, believe me I would also rather hug and talk to you in person.

So do I, Jennifer. It seems so far to northern NY!!

It's a very interesting situation described in this article.

I'm quite introverted. I've used Walkman-type cassette players, CD-playes, and MP3 players (all coupled with dark sunglasses) as intentional barriers to communication. What I realize is just plain-old friendliness to some, can be invasive and stressful to me. I'm more solitary than lonely, though loneliness is something I definitely experience. But then, the introversion exerts itself again and I want to retreat.

Neither of my kids have cell phones, and I have mixed feelings about this. There are times when I think it would come in handy, such as co-ordination pick-ups and drop-offs. But, they aren't necessary and my kids don't even want them.

I usually differentiate between friends and MySpace Friends, the latter of which I have few. I feel that I've made some friends here at Susan's, and I consider those people to be friends: as in Real Life Friends. Why? Well, a while back I started a thread about whether or not online friends were any less real that face-to-face friends. The consensus among the repliers, along with my own POV, was that they are NOT any less real, as people can put up fronts and play characters in real life, too.

I don't try to be unfriendly, but I'm not all that welcoming, either. I've been this way long before I'd ever even heard of the Internet (back to about 1982, I think). So for me, technology hasn't been a replacement for human interactions, but a refuge from them.

I've been much of a home-body for nigh on 20 years now. I think that's been due to a) I interpretted that to be the proper role for a parent and b) I don't have a lot of cash to spend on going out. I'll admit I just don't know a lot about night life, so I could be wrong about the money thing. I think I'd like to give it a try sometime, though.

My kids more readily get together with friends than communicate electronically with them. True, my son will have and go to gaming parties where a bunch of kids goof off with Game Cubes and Wiis and the like, but they also love Risk. Most of my daughter's use of MySpace is to keep in touch with other kids she met at camp, kids she only sees at camp in the summer. So, it seems the i-Thing e-Thing way of life really hasn't seized them. But, neither of them are introverts.

Now why would you equate "going out" or "seeing friends" with night-life, SOG? My usual night of "going out" is going to a friend's place or having them come to our house or maybe a fairly inexpensive restaurant and then to one or another's house.

Nichole

Well, for me, "going out/night life" would usually be to meet friends, as most of my friends no longer live nearby.

These days, most of the friends I do see are when I go out to sit zazen with my sangha or when I go to the local UU church. There, the communication is face-to-face, of course.

Quote from: Nichole on April 17, 2009, 01:56:45 PM
So do I, Jennifer. It seems so far to northern NY!!

Yeah, it's a little far...

I find it interesting that most of my friends are on the web.  I have tried the Trans group meetings and not felt comfortable.  I don't really know how to make friends.  Because all my life I have been a loner, because I did not want anyone to know about my GID.

I want friends, but I am at a loss.  I don't have time for volunteer work, because of work and school.  So I remain on the web.

Janet

There are two sides to this, of course.

I know one other person who is transgendered that I have much of anything in common with, and I consider myself very lucky to know her. Here, there are dozens, and many more that are very different from me and give me a little insight into other ways of life.

I think the most isolating aspects of modern Americann culture are the television and the car. I think the Internet mitigates this to some extent. I have a better social life because of email and social networks -- I mean, real, not virtual -- random mass emails saying, "Hey, let's grab a beer," or "who wants to go skiing tomorrow?" or "Come see my show!"

^^^ Me being contrary, nothing more.

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Post Merge: April 17, 2009, 09:47:29 PM

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P.S. Speaking of which -- time to go have a pint and arrange for skiing tomorrow. I hope they reopen the pass!

Well its hard to replace the human touch, that connection.  Because my name is on all sort of dumb mailing lists, it gets on even more.  Because a pile of them are local art/culture/music related I get invites, both e-vites, and postcards, and flyers and the like on a constant basis to do this or that.  I tend not to.  But when someone I know asks me in person to come see this band, or go to that gallery opening, I tend to go.  I guess I'm just a girl who can't say no.

But people are a lot easier to deal with at a distance, no doubt about that.  They can be difficult - at best.  Too a degree, everyone is hung up in their own little world and bunches of worlds in collision tends to produce some friction as it were.

The computer, the net, is just a tool.  Its a means to an end, and like a lot of good tools, there are a lot of potential ends, not all of them good.  And, as Miss Ani DeFranco oh so poinently reminds us, Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.  And I think that too the degree that you can use it to isolate depends on if you see it as primarily an outgoing device, or an incoming device.  Specifically, does the net serve as an outreach tool for you to the world, or a screening tool - to do a really fine grind on the world before it gets to you? 

Look, Ipods, walkmen and all the rest are way cool.  God to have had something like that when I was young on family car trips - a fact my father agreed on.  But, is it on all the time?  Is there any sort of variety in it?  I mean if you have 40gb of Emo music in it, and all you are ever doing is walking or sitting around listening to Emo music, the world can seem to be a pretty sad place.  (because it is, and by focusing on that and only that you see it clearer).  If you use it to enhance life, because sometimes a little music can add a lot to an experience, then that can become a different deal. 

I think - that like a lot of things, or even most things - (as loath as I am to use the word 'most') its a question of balance, and almost anything, done to the exclusion of other necessary things, can become bad.

Hey, I can isolate with the best of them.  I don't know any of my friends from grad school who got PhDs in History, or Poly Sci, or English who couldn't lock themselves up for a week with a pile of books and do little else.  I like that.  Its one of the things I like about the Net is that before I had to carry around a pile of newspapers and mags like all crazy people do, now I can go to the sites and read what I want from all over the world, and I do.  Nice, neat, no paper. 

But I learned the hard way in grad school, as most of us did, that if you isolate too long, you can do some real damage, so its best to surface once in a while and check out reality.

That's why I like, and have always sought out that theater deal, because it forces me to get out and be with people.  And its a good thing.  Granted, I'm with people who want to be where they are (and in many cases paid a buttload of money to do so, or, conversely, are being paid a buttload of money to be there) and are looking good in whatever the costume de jour is (always a bonus) and are sort-of trying to be on their best behavior, kinda.  And it good talking with people, being with people, and working with people who you like to work with.  Its good to do that in a collaborative setting too, because it helps reinforce the notion that reality is not all about you.  Nothing in the world is better for your self image than being a part of something greater than yourself.

The net, and all that other electronic cocoon, that wrapping yourself into your own little world where no music, thought, or person that hasn't in some sense passed muster can get through, is a bad thing.  It reinforces that 'its all about me' perspective that is the beginning of what Trent Reznor so correctly called, 'the downward spiral.' 

But, you can use that stuff to reach out too.  Really.  At work sometimes we switch Ipods and hit shuffle and its a way, at least for me, to hear some stuff I wouldn't hear otherwise perhaps.  I read the Free Republic because I am interested in what people like that are thinking and saying.  Sometimes it scares me, but hey, we live in a scary world and its dangerous to forget that.  But I read other things that convince me that other parts of the world are doing OK, getting better, or at least people are thinking on and working on them, and that's important to remember too.

The web is just my replacement of TV a lazy way to relax. I have no Ipod or other electronic things. My phone is attached to the wall. I know everyone in my neighborhood by name and talk with them. I spend at least an hour and a half walking in it each day. There is always an adventure. Today the Golden retriever Hank one of the neighborhood dogs spotted a chicken snake crossing the road. Jena and her daughter from South Africa but are east Indians, were screaming at the snake. We have pot luck dinners and neighborhood parties like when the John one of the chopper pilots that was involved in the fight of Saddam sons came home. Lydia and I go to the garden club and Library functions. We have a local theater group which just finished the play Doubt. My son was in a play a few months ago. We trade veggies from our gardens and help each other out.

I do not go to night spots or look for friends they just seem to be there during my normal day.

P.S. I also do not go to blogs you need to join and get pass words.

I might have actually met the best person EVER on the internet.

Well, we met in real life.

But now we talk on the internet, as we live a fair distance apart.

And it means a lot to me.

So, um, that article can go and multiply, thanks.

Good article, thanks for posting it Nichole!

I think one can find a balance. I have friends who live close by and I see them as our schedules permit. Some of my local acquaintances are on fb too, so we have interactions both in person and online. I have other friends who live far away, some of whom I've never met, including some people here, and we interact via these new technologies that didn't exist when I was a kid. I cherish all my friends!

Most of my friends in my immediate area don't have trans experience, and so I'm glad to have online friends who do share this aspect.

I've also been spending much less time here, but it's always nice to be able to check in with folks.

Z

The article, and all the introspective posts following the OP, has been a bit of an enlightment for me.

This site is the only group/forum I am involved with, though I do read many blogs and web-zines, most which I find referenced on the boards here. That said, I feel I spend to much time on the web, and so does my girl, but she's a gamer of sorts.

I have social anxiety which is almost crippling at times, but when I do get out and about, I try to make eye contact, smile, and be sweet and polite. I don't carry a music filled flash drive/ipod thingy, but I do have one. It seems to make me feel more like I'm not partaking in society walking around with something plugged into my ears. Plus, I can't hear the birds chirping as well.

Few of my "real life" friends are connected, so other than job related email and my ability to do the google-arama for extended periods of time, I tend to  communicate with most people face to face or by phone.

I'd like to get the hand written letter thing going again with several people I know.

My cell phone is only on my person when my gf and I are apart, for we send the smiles, hugs and such when we are apart. I like getting texts from her. Some people don't understand my take on the cell phone thing, for it seems they are attached to theirs at a molecular level. My phone beeps one single beep when an incoming call arrives, (drives me nuts when a phone does the whole reveille thing), and I don't answer in public. Rather I excuse myself if I desire to answer it then and there.

So, yes, there is the "tool" aspect which I agree with.  But I feel the all too often public cell-phone use, texting, and audio devices tend to alienate and detract from society and broaden the gap between people as they are moving in and about eachothers lives without really acknowledging the others presence.

Great article, and thread. I must say, everybodies insight on these kind of things is always enlightening.

This has put me in the mood to go for a walk before I have to go to work. Y'all have a nice day.