their virtual friends were equal to or better than their real-life friends, according to a survey of 30,000 gamers
what is illusion; what is real? after i lost the love of my life, personal computers began kicking in. i never made a long lasting friend from bulletin boards but when aol began, i cranked up a m4m spirituality room where i wound up meeting a guy who would become my best friend.
i lived in florida; he in california. though i made my living in media & half my family was from the "biz", i was mostly media unsavvy. i frankly still don't know the difference between mel brooks, brooke shields and shields and yarnell. yet i would become best friends with a guy who was not only a television (supposedly str8 ) heart throb, but who was at one time, i later learned, proclaimed by "insider" magazines to be the highest paid actor on daytime t.v.
how else would i ever have gotten to meet this guy? a gay bar? the party of a mutual friend?
did you ever enter a chat room and how often do you see people saying the most horrible things? sometimes it is as if they are just typing into a machine rather than speaking to another sentient being.
as i walk through life, i consider even the consciousness of trees and stones. as much as i see all of life as a series of constructs and illusion, none of this is virtual; all of this, to me, is--as far as it gets for all practical and immediate purposes--real.
so to my mind, we should behave accordingly.