Are Online Relationships Superficial?

On the dangers of real-world stereotyping

This was written in the early noughties, before the emergence of social media. It all seems rather innocent now, but I think parts of it still have merit.

Many of the philosophers who have written on the internet have argued that online relationships are in various ways diminished compared to everyday, embodied kinds. For example, Hubert Dreyfus in his On The Internet argues that “our sense of the reality of things and people and our ability to interact effectively with them depend on the way our body works silently in the background. Its ability to get a grip on things provides our sense of the reality of what we are doing and what we are ready to do…All this our body does so effortlessly, pervasively, and successfully that it is hardly noticed. That is why it is so easy to think that in cyberspace we could get along without it, and why it would, in fact, be impossible to do so.”

It is easy to understand why philosophers make these kinds of arguments. Many important facets of our personal relationships seem to require face-to-face contact. Dreyfus, for example, argues that trust in another person is in part based on the experience that they do not take advantage of our vulnerability when given the opportunity to so in a face-to-face situation. Even if one does not accept this, it does seem to be true that we can have a certain kind of confidence in people we meet in person that is not available in online relationships. Particularly, the opportunity for gross deception is minimised in a face-to-face situation. Gordon Graham, and countless others, have pointed out that it is very easy to deceive people on the internet by inventing wholly imaginary personas—something that it is much more difficult to achieve in the non-virtual world.

It is for these, and similar, kinds of reasons, then, that there is the belief that internet relationships are the poor relations of “real”, embodied relationships. However, one must be a bit careful before jumping too readily to this conclusion.

One reason is that non-virtual relationships are subject to kinds of distortion which are largely absent from internet relationships. Physical attractiveness, for example, is an important factor influencing the judgements we make about people. Specifically, we tend to make unwarranted inferences about people on the basis of our perception of their looks. For instance, as a result of what psychologists call a “positive halo effect”, attractive people are considered more intelligent, more moral, better adjusted, nicer, more sexually responsive, and more competent than their less attractive fellows. Of course, it isn’t only attractiveness that influences the judgements we make about people. We also take our cues from, among other things, age, sex, racial characteristics, style of dress, accent and social class.

The reason these kinds of cues often result in distorted judgements about people is because of our use of “implicit personality theories” that are rooted in stereotypes. In other words, we tend to take our cue from these readily identifiable characteristics to place people into categories, and then we assume that they share the other attributes that we think are typical of the category.

The philosopher Miranda Fricker has pointed to an interesting fictional example of this kind of process. In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, set in Alabama in the 1930s, there is a trial of a black man. The all-white jury genuinely do not believe his testimony, even though it is clear he is telling the truth. The important point being that in that culture, at that time, being black was a marker indicating—quite falsely—a lack of credibility. Not surprisingly, it is easy to find real-life examples of stereotyping. For instance, Rodney Karr found that gay males were rated more shallow, yielding, tense and passive than males labelled as heterosexual.

The significant point about internet relationships is that the characteristics we rely on to make judgements about people in the non-virtual world are largely invisible in the virtual world. The irony here is that it is precisely that facet of internet communication that makes gross deception possible—the absence of a face-to-face relationship—that undermines our tendency to stereotype. It would be possible to overstate the significance of this fact. Even in relationships conducted entirely via the medium of the written word, we still make judgements about people which go beyond the evidence. However, it is likely that we do so largely on the basis of the actual content of our communication with a person, which, arguably at least, is more likely to be indicative of those aspects of a person’s character that they themselves consider to be salient.

The corollary of this point is that in our internet relationships we have greater control over what aspects of our character we present to other people than we do in our everyday relationships. Of course, this is why people worry about deception on the internet. And it is a real concern—the individual who adopts a false persona in order to procure a sexual encounter with a vulnerable person behaves badly. But it is only part of the story. If by controlling what aspects our character we present to people online we are able to avoid the more pernicious effects of our tendency to make judgements on the basis of unwarranted stereotypes, then it is possible we will develop online relationships that are, at least in some ways, less distorted and more real than most of our everyday, embodied relationships.