Virtual Friends
This past Sunday while walking into church I said Hi to Dan our ... Hmmm always so hard to come up with titles for the leaders at our church ...
Worship Leader, well yes, but we have more than one band so he only leads on the Sunday's his band plays ...
Worship Coordinator, OK, but I don't think he coordinates the whole Worship service, more the music part ...
Worship Pastor, no, we have five Pastor's but Dan's not one of them ... Hey, lets see what our church website has to say about this weighty issue ... Dan Price - Music. Well it's settled then.
As I was saying, I said Hi to Dan our Music Guy and he asked me if I had a blog, because if I did, he wanted to read it. Wow, pretty much made my day and put me over the hump to sit down and finally start a blog of my own.
I know Dan primarily through his blog, for that matter I know pretty much everyone that I know by name at my new church through their blogs. For a while now I've pondered about this new sort of friendship. In my mind I've coined the term virtual friends.
I know lots of things about Dan, Noel, Joel, JR and Sean via their blogs and the comments they leave on each others blogs. I've even met most of them face to face, but yet I really don't know them at all. It's a bit like listening to people on the radio, you get a vision in your mind of what they are like and then see them in person and go "That's what they look like!!!"
In this case it's not so much looks, most of them have pictures on their blogs, but the absence of any "life experience" w/ my virtual friends. Especially in the case of Noel, since he blogs much more frequently than the others; I have a feel for the pace of his life, his interests and have come to admire his ability to keep the overriding issue at hand in the forefront of his mind. Yet if I were to walk up to him at church or his favorite coffee shop and dive into a conversation with him, dropping in various tidbits from his blog along the way, I imagine he would find it a bit creepy. Sure on one level he knows his blog a public thing, but on the other hand, at an interpersonal level we don't really have a connection. From his point of view it would be as if someone who had stalked him suddenly walked up and started talking to him about the bike ride he went on w/ his kid the day before. To go back to the radio analogy, we each have a minds eye of each other, mine a bit more informed than his, but both sorely lacking in terms of one on one chemistry. Will this person who writes and speaks so clearly, come across as abrasive in person? or laid back? Confident or a bit shy? Hard to say if you've never sat down for a bite to eat or spent an afternoon helping them clean out their garage. Hence the radio effect of the blog world, we each have a vision in our minds of how the other person will come across (the interpersonal equivalent to the mind picture of what our favorite radio personality looks like), we are more times than not in for a big shock when that mind picture meets reality.
It will take time for our social structures to catch up to the blogging world through an expanded vocabulary which includes these new types of relationships and social norms to grease the skids when "pen pals" do eventually meet face to face. In the mean time, for myself, I've taken a cautious approach in meeting the people I've come to know online. Noel asked me to introduce myself to him, so that was easy, although I still felt really nervous that I might do something in person to deflate his "minds eye" of me. I bumped into JR walking in from the parking lot one day, went up after church to say hi to Sean after I realized who he was (The Firehead = red hair, duh!) and Dan likes to play at local coffee shops and posts the times on his blog, so I just went early one evening and got to hang out w/ him and his wife for a few minutes before he played.
Turns out Dan a great example of the minds eye thing, my minds eye made Dan out as a carbon copy of Noel. I figured I would find myself outclassed in a one on one conversation as I'm not particularly fast or witty in person, as Noel seems to be. Turns out Dan very laid back and easy to talk to. I've enjoyed our brief conversations very much and hope things will work out to have more as time goes on.
So in that spirit, thanks for the boost at church today Dan! Hope you like my first set of posts in the blogging world.
posted by Stevo @ 10:58 PM
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