Are Internet Friends Better than IRL Friends? With Katherine Dee (Default Friend)

Journalist Katherine Dee joins Simone and Malcolm for a deep dive on mediated relationships. They discuss intimacy via screens, "real" internet friends, social media personas, roleplaying communities, and lessons from Katherine's experiences with online dating.

Katherine Dee: [00:00:00] In the kind of environment we live in, either you have no friends and only very perfunctory relationships, or you have, or you're, like, isolate, you're physically isolated but you have these deep internet relationships.

Katherine Dee: Um, and I think that's sort of like an interesting, like what is the value of someone who like you don't really go deep with but like you have a lot of physical experiences with? Like you're both, you know, like you're maybe You always see them at church or like you play basketball with them or something and you have that kind of like regularity and the relationship is less based on this confessional sort of thing that millennials love so much, um, and more, more based on like physical movement somehow, or like involvement in a project that's bigger than oneself.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, everyone. We are very excited to be joined today by Catherine Dee, AKA Default Friend, one of the world's preeminent internet experts and historians in internet culture. She is absolutely insightful.

Simone: She is a journalist who contributes to quite a few different [00:01:00] outlets. She's a blogger. She's just. Very insightful and fun to talk with and she suggested something that really piqued our interest when we were scheduling this podcast, the durability of mediated relationships. Catherine, what do you have in mind here?

Katherine Dee: Yeah, this is something I think about a lot. Like how much intimacy. can be fostered just completely over a screen or on the phone? Um, and it's sort of an open ended question, but it's something that I think about a lot. I guess, maybe a more fun way to ask is, like, how real are internet friends?

Simone: It's such a good

Malcolm: question. Which is to say that I think that the different contexts in which we communicate with somebody Access different parts of our brain, and to an extent, you are literally communicating with a different person. So in a way, a multimedia friendship can be much deeper than a non multimedia friendship.

Malcolm: By this, what I mean is the person who talks [00:02:00] with Simone over the phone. Versus the person who talks with Simone in person, versus the person who writes emails to Simone, versus the person who writes, you know, one way we used to communicate when we were apart from each other was through journal posts. So Simone would write eight pages of journals about her day and then I would like annotate that afterwards as like a, oh, you did this, this is interesting.

Malcolm: And each one of those I feel is talking with. A slightly different person living in the same person's head. Yeah,

Simone: actually. So there's, there's a, and people think we're really crazy for doing this. Um, those who watch video of our podcast, because Malcolm and I are in the same house, but we, we always do podcasts from different rooms and that's actually like very much a good illustration of how for us, we, we will actively mediate our relationship through a video call.

Simone: Um, just to get into a certain different mind state. Um, because. I, for example, think very differently when I'm alone in a room than when I'm in a, in a room with a person, even if it's Malcolm, who might as well just be me because we're [00:03:00] the same person. So I think that's, that's really interesting.

Simone: What are your thoughts

Malcolm: on all this?

Katherine Dee: Um, I, I think that you can actually get closer, um, in, in mediated relationships than you can, um, in physical world ones. I mean, part of that is just that you act you know, you actually can spend more time with the person, even though it's a different type of time, right?

Katherine Dee: Um, and there's, I, I think, actually you could be more deceptive in real life than in cyberspace. In cyberspace, you could lie about Right? Like your profession or your hair color or things like that. Um, but you, there's the, you can't really lie emotionally as much, especially after you hit a certain amount of time with someone.

Katherine Dee: And I feel like with a lot of like digital relationships for really, if you have a high volume of communication, which a lot do because we're always sort of ambiently on our phones or ambiently online. Um. You could actually start to merge with the other [00:04:00] person and I don't know if that's healthy, that could be actually very toxic, but I do think um, if not like durable, like you actually can get closer.

Katherine Dee: Um, and yeah, I just think, I just think about that a lot and like what happens to relationships where you have that like closeness and then you bring it into the physical world. Does it change?

Malcolm: Well, so something that, that, you know, we've talked about in other places and we might do a full episode on this.

Malcolm: is the way that online environments are structured changes the type of interactions and views that will be espoused in them. Because it naturally leads to specific types of status hierarchies within those communities. So you take a something like Reddit, right? Where the most average liked opinion is the most likely to be seen.

Malcolm: Meaning you're going to get very normie, inoffensive, sort of left leaning opinions. Whereas you take something like, um, 4chan, where it's the most stimulating opinion is the most likely to be seen. So you're likely to get the most offensive opinions rising to [00:05:00] the top. Or you can contrast that with something like Twitter, um, where you know, for something I wrote to be seen.

Malcolm: It actually helps more if somebody disagrees with it and, and, and ratios me, you know, retweets me, um, than if they like it in terms of getting it in front of other people, so you end up with, you know, pointlessly offensive takes often in that community, um, in a different way than they're pointlessly offensive on 4chan, where they're just meant to be mentally stimulating unfortunate, like the maximum emotional response instead of the maximum disagreement or, um, and so within these different communities, I wonder how you think about different environments, how they change, whether it's romantic or friendships that form in those environments.

Katherine Dee: Yeah, that's actually, this is like an interesting point because I think like when there's like the public facing. Expression right on the Twitter timeline versus in the Twitter DMS, and then there's 1 on 1 DMS, and then there's group chats, right? And in all of those situations, there's different incentives, but I think it's I [00:06:00] think we could think about it in the same way as, um, you know, the difference in an office versus someone you meet at you know, through a club or hobby, right? Because you're, there's, there's, you have to bring a different piece of yourself to that environment. Um, when I think about like online relationships, I guess I've like often, and even when I've written about it, I think about it in like the, like one on one, right?

Katherine Dee: Um, and. Somehow carrying someone with you everywhere. But I haven't thought about it as much, um, in these sort of more public environments. And that's a, that's a