It is rather disconcerting to notice what a significant level of prejudice towards the new online instruments of communication people still need to overcome in terms of perception.
I have noticed that almost in every circumstance, participants engaging in online interactions fail to perceive the proceeding as “real”. Although it is very seldom, especially in British culture, that their interaction with others involves physical contact, as the only (major) aspect missing in online communication, somehow the very reality of their cyber-interlocutors is banished into the territory of fiction. They can see and hear them in real time but somehow this seems not to be enough to acknowledge the whole thing as “truthful interaction”.
I don’t know if this is because people tend to associate online communication more with entertainment, where suspension of disbelief towards its fictional nature is consciously accepted and temporarily adopted as the required condition to make it effective, or because this technology is actually still too new for it to gain a better understanding.
People don’t seem to operate the same kind of “fictionalising” process when using the telephone for example. In that case, contrary to the fact that the information about the person at the other end of the “wire” conveyed by the instrument patented by Bell, is much less substantial or detailed than the one provided by cyber-communication, they seem unproblematically convinced about it’s veracity. Maybe the overall percentage of prank calls over the last century and a half was small enough to eventually get people convinced that when they pick up the phone the voice introducing itself as Mr. Bergman is Mr. Bergman himself.
On the other hand, strangely oblivious to the significant surplus of information provided by the instruments of the internet instant messaging services, a lot of people who otherwise regularly and intensively use them, perceive their online interaction as some sort of “phantasy”.
Most peculiar and amusing and definitely worth a more consistent look into it...