OK, last time I lied. In truth, I do need you. Just in a different way.

I was thinking the other day about my addiction to the internet (ask my brother; ask my mother; as my father; ask my roommate; ask anyone who sees my AIM SN always online, they will affirm the truth of my physiological dependence.)

I thought, “Am I wasting my time?” Where will my life go if I spend it all on the internet?

The universe wanted me to learn some kind of cosmic lesson concerning the issue recently…the main site I go to (it’s useless to talk about it because it doesn’t exist) suspended me for a good two days. I remember it clearly, because the experience was oh so painful and boring. Boredom, I thought I knew thee, but I was an ignorant fool. You see…these 48 hours of suspension were the first two days I had gone back to A&M to move in. It was a precarious time when 1) I didn’t have any classes, 2) people were still moving and settling back in, and 3) there just wasn’t much to do. I couldn’t meet up with my established friends from class, because they were scattered around still, but I couldn’t pacify myself with my sweet internet habit either, because the message upon log-in loomed: “Your Account Has Been Suspended.”

Why couldn’t I have just gone out into the Extrovert’s World and talked with some of my fellow dorm people? I know a few of the couple hundred Lechner residents’ name, but the dorm isn’t Cheers…It would have been just as easy to set up shack near the Foyer for Liberal Arts Majors and Those Who Support Them (we popularly adorn it with the name “HoboFo”), and just strike up conversation: no names or introductions formally required.

Well, it seems that my sweet lover-addiction, the Internet, has the answer. Apparently, the side effect of my habit is that I’m beginning to lose what makes us able to contact people IRL.

Ok, Ok, so that’s a really big website with a bunch of images and stuff like that, but it kinda hits me in the soft spots of my person.

I have often said to myself, “Why should I go out, when I can do whatever I want on my own indoors?” Points 1 and 2 seem to address that: I use the idea of escaping annoying inconveniences as a plus to the internet, but it seems that in order to function in the real world (something that we all must do, whether we choose to or not), we must be able to deal with these annoyances.

This point particularly made a clean touch on target:

Today, though, if I’m a huge Slipknot fan I can go find a slipknot forum and meet a dozen people there. People just like me. Same sense of humor, same interests, same outlook. We can start a private chatroom and lock everybody else out. Say goodbye to the tedious, awkward, painful process of dealing with somebody who’s truly different from me, someone coming from a completely different place in the world. That’s another old-world inconvenience, like having to wash your clothes in a creek or wait for a raccoon to wander by the outhouse so you could wipe your ass with it.

I surf the internet to find people with similar interests to me. Which especially benefits me because some of my interests are weird. Maybe I don’t listen to Slipknot (and just MAYBE I don’t have to walk up hill in the snow both ways to get to school and wipe my buttocks with a raccoon), but a good 70% of my music won’t be played on any radio station. When I say “Academic Decathlon,” most people look at me and ask, “Wasn’t that in The Day After Tomorrow” (…oh wait…it seems I’m outdated…now people are more apt to ask, “Wasn’t that in High School Musical?”) Even of the people who DO know Academic Decathlon, most only competed locally or regionally. The nuances of state or national competition are wasted upon them (and I sure remember the frustrating days when these nuances were lost on me!)

I’m not trying to be elitist. Because the fact of the matter is that the feeling is reciprocal: for the items of interest to these other people, the nuances are wasted upon me.

It seems that this mutual relationship of incompatibility that I would rather minimize (or go without) is something that humans have lived with for quite some time…and here’s the killer: they’ve been better for it. People talk about the “good ole days” (and that’s another fallacy for another time; all idealized “good ole days” are just that–ideal) and how the current generation is declining…and how can I argue against that?

I do not give up a fencing match when it is 14 to 3, however, so I won’t just give in to what some article says. I maintain that EVEN though the physical words we use is only 7% of communication (the other 93% is body language and tone) and that EVEN though the people we talk to on the internet can not readily know, care, feel, love, or hate me, this does not make knowing, caring, feeling, loving, or hating online impossible.

I parry my opponent’s blade with new data: people do consider their online friends important. Blah blah blah, 43% of people feel as strongly about their web community friends as they do their real life friends, but I think there’s something more to it than statistics:

Internet users also report that the Internet helps them make new friends, both online and off. Internet users, on average, have just under five contacts online who they consider to be “friends” but have never met in real life, and almost two friends in real life that they originally met online. Those numbers may seem low to those of us who frequent events like Arsmeets on a regular basis, but the report claims that the number of offline friends that originated online has more than doubled since the project began six years ago. Tipping the scales on the high end, I think it’s fairly safe to say that well over 80% of all of my real life friends and acquaintances originated from the Internet in some way—that’s well over just two people.

I guess with all of the abductions and sexual who-knows-whats on Facebook or Myspace, we shouldn’t be so permissive (heck, I know a guy who “fell in love” with a man on the internet, due to this man’s very clever use of fake pictures of a woman), but the idea is that people–sometimes–meet their online friends in real life. Jacqui Cheng from Arstechnica naturally relates her experience at the so-called “Arsmeets,” and I am compelled to agree with my own experiences in meeting the people from Acadectalk and Demidec at the Academic Decathlon National competition.

Should we be content to nurture friends from those we are incompatible with, or should we take advantage of technology for the better?