The pleasures of suffering.

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Reports about meeting that special person via the internet are probably the most common stories about one-to-one relationships on the internet. Many of these stories start by telling us that the person reporting was down and out, disappointed with his or her relationships, and quite sure that meeting someone via the internet wouldn't work for him or her. Despite this sort of minor key opening, however, most of these stories have happy endings.

Stories about internet community often reach a similar sort of happy ending, though they follow a somewhat different pattern. It's a pattern in which suffering creates a need for closeness that for some reason isn't satisfied by more traditional inter-personal contact. The archetypal story seems to spring from Howard Rheingold's classic The Virtual Community. In the first chapter of that book, Rheingold relates two stories about the creation and manifestation of community via the internet. In both of these examples unseen, and hitherto unknown, acquaintances offer support and comfort in a time of medical crisis, support and comfort that hadn't come from other sources. Rheingold's book is now over ten years old. People probably don't read it anymore (though they should). But the experience of discovering a sense of community with people you've never met through their empathy toward your own crisis seems to have become an initiation rite into truly becoming what used to be called a netizen, a cyber-citizen. If you haven't given aid or been helped in this way, you still don't yet belong.

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Go to: Though they didn't necessarily think that, or
Go to: If you knew him like we knew him.