This week’s NYT Modern Love column, by Theodora Stites, allows forty-somethings like me (dangerously close to fifty-something) to gain a bit of an insight into the social world of twenty-somethings.   It’s all about the technology: the cell phones and laptops and web sites that have become the primary avenues (at least for certain young urban dwellers) of social interaction:

I’M 24 years old, have a good job, friends. But like many of my
generation, I consistently trade actual human contact for the more
reliable emotional high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com and
pokes on Facebook. I live for Friendster views, profile comments and
the Dodgeball messages that clog my cellphone every night.

I prefer, in short, a world
cloaked in virtual intimacy. It may be electronic, but it is intimacy
nevertheless. Besides, eye contact isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and
facial expressions can be so hard to control.

     She does a great job walking an old fogy like me through the various programs and sites, and showing us how these become the means of building and discriminating among social relationships:

WHY, you ask, do I have to be a part of so many online communities?
Isn’t it hard to keep track? I need to belong to all of them because
each one enables me to connect to people with different levels of
social intimacy.

Don’t know you but think I may want you to be
part of my network? I’ll contact you through Match.com or Nerve. Just
met? I’ll look you up on MySpace. Known each other for a while, but
haven’t been in touch recently? Friendster message. Friends with my
friends and want to get to know you better? Dodgeball or MySpace. Good
friends and want to connect more often? Dodgeball. Really good friends?
Instant Message.

    The medium, it would seem, is no longer simply the message, it is the means of identifying how we relate to one another.  Wouldn’t be horrible if you thought you were in an Instant Message sort of relationship and it turned out to be merely MySpace?

    For me, predictably, all of this raises a question of how an ethics that understands close, personal, face-to-face contact as the fundamental glue of moral life – like Confucianism – can possibly survive or be relevant in the new technological context. 

     My first impulse was to think it impossible.  Instant messaging your parents would not be sufficient expression of filiality.  You need to be there, to see the context of the utterances to gain a full understanding of how they are doing and what they need.   Email cannot transmit enough information either way – as a show of affection nor as a tool of inquiry – to enable the fulfillment of social duties.

    That was my first thought.  I do not want to simply give up on it there, however.  I really do believe that the kids are all right, that younger generations, as they forge new forms of relationships, have not abandoned the moral life.

    Perhaps as the technology spreads and deepens and insinuates itself more pervasively into social intercourse, the medium really will come to signify one’s level of loving commitment.  When I am there, thirty years from now (is that overly optimistic?), lying in a nursing home bed, clutching my PDA, or whatever form the one unifying machine may take, will I truly be moved when my daughter chooses to send me an IM, as opposed to a mere email or blog comment?  Of course, it will be a video IM; we will see each other in the tiny screens, and chat back and forth for a time.  In doing this it will be not only her words that reach out and comfort me, but the performance of the exchange itself.  That fact that she stopped and contacted me – and did so in the most direct and intimate technological manner – will leave me with a clear reminder of her love and affection.  Maybe that is how it will be.

     But I think I would still prefer her there, physically next to me, where I could hold her hand and share a drink or a snack.  Perhaps it will come to virtual humanity, but, if it does we will be losing the possibility of tactile affection, and touch matters.