Plenty has been written about our interactions with technology, and how it affects our relationships and mannerisms. I write, not to reiterate what has been said, but to give account of my own experience. I believe it is human nature to dislike change, but for us younger generations it's been a seamless introduction into the world of technology. We've grown extremely accustomed to it, to the point where forgetting one's phone at home feels like a great loss and huge inconvenience. Literature about the great changes technology has brought is from the point of view of those older generations, more often than not in a negative light. It isn't unfair to point out the negatives of any change, and to that I'd strongly argue that the positives far outweigh the negatives of our relationships with technology. In my case, the situation goes like this:
I grew up in Mexico. From a young age I was introduced to computers; my father was an IT technician, completely immersed in this emerging new world of computers. When my family moved to the U.S, the biggest challenge was, not the loss of friends or the loss of familiarity, but the loss of communication. Language was lost. But here in the U.S I began reading books, a long and immersive series that made me, my writing and my speech, eloquent and well-spoken. Though I had only been living in the U.S for a year, I moved from a beginner "ESL" (English as a second language) class, to a Pre-AP advanced English class. I couldn't understand the slang and everyday speech of my fellow classmates, but I understood most of every writing I came across. This series I was reading was the beginning to my relationship with an online group of people that, to this day I still talk with and consider very close friends. It was a roleplay group, and we ALL had one thing in common; we loved to read the same book series.
Many of us lived in different continents, let alone states or countries. Our mother languages ranged from Chinese, Spanish and Dutch to Punjabi, Japanese and Russian. It was, and still is, a literate roleplay centered around the world that we're all familiar with, with our own characters, our backstories and our own writing.
The thing that struck me the hardest was how easily we accepted the relationship we had formed with each other. We'd never seen each other in person (though we'd have skype videocalls on Friday movie nights and knew the names of all each other's pets' names). We didn't bat an eye when we had to calculate for timezones for a site-wide meeting, we learned to do 3D modeling and texturing to make a private map online for our characters, learned HTML coding to make our websites better and communicated with each other at almost all times of the day, excited about how our characters would interact with each other. Our families would grow concerned that we were always glued to our computers, talking with these 'internet friends'. It seemed like, to them, our friends were almost imaginary. It was strange, to us, that they found this strange. It was natural to us- there was nothing imaginary about each other. To us, there was no difference between the friends we saw at school to the friends we saw online. One of the things that attracted me the most to this group was how transparent we were. Almost always, especially with other roleplaying groups, there tends to be a distinction between a person and their "avatar"- an idealized version of themselves. But in this roleplay we were either IC (In Character) or OOC (Out of character). We had many characters; old, young, dead, alive. When in character we committed faithfully to their personalities, lives and manners. But when outside of them we didn't feel the need to roleplay yet another character. We were happy to be ourselves, sometimes even more so than in the offline world.
All of these relationships that, for 6 years, I've formed, would've never been possible without the use of my laptop. It's a strange, yet (for us) a natural relationship.
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