Intimacy Online

            In the chapter “Intimacy” of Coming of Age in Second Life, Boellstorff revisits the notions of the real and the virtual in the context of sexual and nonsexual intimacy. I found myself being the typical outsider to Second Life that Boellstorff described as I had difficulty understanding the role of love and genuine relationships in a virtual setting. Second life does, indeed, provide a unique environment for forging relationships in that many prejudgments about potential social partners do not take place in-world since all a particular resident can see is the avatar of another user, which may not be an accurate representation of the person’s “real self” at all. As such, people Boellstorff interviewed argued that they got to know people from the inside out rather than the outside in as they would in real life. This allows people to form friendships with people in Second Life that they probably never would have interacted with had they met in real life.

            While I can understand how this aspect would encourage the formation of virtual relationships, I was a bit surprised at how common Boellstorff depicted love relationships to be in Second Life. In fact, he stated that people fall in love and establish relationships rather quickly and quoted one resident expressing that in her experience, “relationships in online communities often become a lot more intense in the early stages that in the real world” (169). Characterizations such as this cause me to ponder whether there is a distinction between mature love and infatuation in the virtual world. In real life relationships, there are typically disagreements and problems generated by the external environment at some point that lead each partner to make decisions on the future of the relationship and then act accordingly. It seems that such hardships would be limited or absent in the virtual world, which likely makes virtual love particularly appealing.

However, these benefits of virtual love do not come without drawbacks like those discussed in the chapter where people disappear from the virtual world and their virtual lovers have no way to discover their whereabouts since they have no knowledge of the person’s “actual” identity. Another issue that I have is that while Boellstorff described a scenario in which a resident felt comforted by a virtual hug from his avatar, I find it hard to believe that virtual interactions could ever have the same psychological benefits as actual, physical human touch. One crude example of the role of physical contact can be seen in Harlow’s (horrific) experiments with monkeys and “cloth mothers”. This leads me to wonder if there would be any psychological ramifications of withdrawing from real life relationships in favor of virtual ones.