Virtually Virtual

This age of computers and virtual realities and vitual neighbors is so amazing. And sometimes so strange to navigate. What are the rules? Where are the lines? What is real? What isn't? Do you know a person or don't you? Are they real or have they just invented the persona you "know"? It's an interesting and sometimes odd new frontier.

For instance, let's say that you play online Scrabble. Let's just pick that, for example. You play people from all around the world. It can be very interesting to hear where a person's from and what's going on at the moment where they are. And then you have regulars that you play. Their histories are interesting, sometimes extremely so. You get to "know" them, what they do, if they have kids, how old, what they like, what they don't. So they feel like friends. It seems like you know them, and maybe in ways you know them better than some people they see every day. It's sometimes easier to reveal things about yourself to a faceless person who's never going to meet you or actually know you in "real" life.

But here's a drawback or at least a twist in the whole thing: Let's say that all of a sudden one of those people disappears. You don't hear from them. Time passes and they're just...gone. Into cyberspace. Lost in the ether. And you realize that by being only a virtual friend, you'll never know what happened to them. Wouldn't that be strange? It'd be a weird feeling. Hey! A whole new field of psychiatry has opened up! Cyber withdrawal.

Like I said---new frontiers.