First name terms: March 09, 1998 issue of New Thinking

March 09, 1998 New Thinking:
First name terms

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March 09, 1998

First name terms

By Gerry McGovern

On the Internet we are all on first name terms.

It was a thing that attracted me to email and that whole informal Internet culture. There was no standing on ceremony. No pretentiousness. Everything was straight up and to the point. Email cut through. It was precise. Our emails wanted to say something.

And, of course, there was this sense of being out there with a gang of pioneers. There was this thrill, this feeling that everyone was in it together. And everyone was on first name terms.

I still feel the thrill. I still wonder at it all with a childish fervor. I still feel so lucky to be here right now, at this moment of turn, at this moment of shift. It is so great to be alive, breathing the new air, seeing the new things, gripping and molding the new.

Life is a complicated thing (and we wouldn’t have it any other way). Sometimes I feel that I may have stepped too far too quickly, and that I should retrace a little. All this reaching and bouncing can sometimes be dizzying.

Sometimes I feel that because I am on first name terms with everyone I send and am sent email to, that I am forgetting who I am really on first name terms with. But then everyone is a friend on the Internet. Were all buddies. Friendships are consummated by email. Why, sometimes I even get to meet my friends.

It’s easy to forget your online friends. Without a practical purpose to the communication, friends can fade away into the twilight of cyberspace, as each day brings another hundred emails dancing for attention. I rarely send an email to Internet friends that purely says: ‘Good morning. Hope you’re well,’ or ‘Haven’t heard from you in a while. Hope everything’s okay.’

It’s easy to lose friends too. A sharp or misunderstood word, the fact that the friendship was never very deep in the first place, can mean that losing a friend has the benefit of having to respond to less email.

Then of course there are those who don’t address me with any name; they just start straight into what they have to say to me. And there are those who don't leave a signature after what they write, or who maybe just put initials.

These sort of email put me on edge. Being the mellow person that I am, I will reply rather tersely, and if they didn’t address me or sign their name, they certainly won’t get an email from me addressing them or signing my name. So there!

I was never into formality but somehow the entire informality of the Internet leads me to believe that formality has its uses. Let me be blunt: I have very few friends. I like it that way. The Internet is great but I have made no real friendships over it. I have felt a camaraderie, sure, but even that is dissolving, as the Internet dissolves into the wider mass of the population. (That, of course, is a wonderful process to see happening.)

I suppose the Internet, being the distant medium that it is, uses first names in an attempt to bridge that distance. We all know, of course, that there is more to friendship than being on first name terms.

Gerry McGovern

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I was never into formality but somehow the entire informality of the Internet leads me to believe that formality has its uses.