I had a near miss last night. I thought I had accidentally deleted Dolly, my (fluff)Friend from Facebook. I’m not hugely into the whole Facebook thing, but I was very fond of Dolly. I had even written about her once .

My Facebook page was gunked up with all sorts of history boxes that for some reason you aren’t allowed to collapse anymore, and I was on a deleting-spree to get rid of those boxes. Just clicking and deleting and clicking and deleting, to clean up my little space there. Then I went to pet and feed Dolly, as is my routine, and she was gone. I clicked around and was able to locate her in some parallel Facebook reality where the notice at the top told me that this was Dolly and asked if I would like to adopt a (fluff)Friend of my very own? I clicked and hunted to try to break through whatever barrier was keeping me from Dolly, who I could look at, but could not feed or pet, since somehow, somewhere, something went very wrong and she and I got separated by some horrible Facebook accident. This is where it gets frightening. I cried real tears. I wrote a eulogy on my personal blog and cried actual, physical tears for a pretend Caribou. And the loss of the munny she’d won from my gambling, the (fluff)Foods that were in her pantry, and the (fluff)Habitats and Decorations I had in storage. All gone forever.

As it turns out, it takes more than a mishap with the mouse to kill off your (fluff)Friends, thankfully. I mourned Dolly for a half an hour then mustered the strength to go shopping for a new (fluff)Friend to adopt. When I clicked to sign up with the application, Dolly reappeared, mine again. She didn’t seem to have missed me at all. There was no joyful reunion…on her part anyway. She just stood there on her hill with the mini (fluff)Mouseu on her head, grinning in that silly Dolly way of hers.

This got me thinking about that other life I lead. The one online. I’ve been at this online networking for over a decade now. It started off slowly, just hanging out at The Atlanta Braves official website, cyber-drooling over Tom Glavine. Yup, that’s right. Tom Glavine (he’s now with the Mets). And, you people thought you knew me. I still have a friend from those days.

Then I got pregnant with my now nine year-old and I headed into the complex world of parenting websites. I found support and friendship at a pregnancy/birth board on iParenting, and well, whatever the opposite of that might be on the Infant Feeding Debate board on Babycenter. OK, that’s not entirely true, I did find some long lasting friends on that board, too (like the people who run this very site). The dynamics there were very (um, VERY) different than the birth board dynamics, though. The friendships seemed to blossom after I (ahem…cough…sputter…cough) left Babycenter. In the years since, I have talked on the phone with a couple of the women I met there, and exchanged baby gifts with a couple others, and of course, I bump into them all over this world-wide-web, reading their blogs and chatting on boards.

From my birth board, I have turned some of those cyber-friends into real life friends. My youngest child’s Godmother is a friend I made on that board. I’ve met four women from that board in real life, and talk to a couple of the women regularly on the phone. I have a few real life friends who have turned into cyber-friends because we no longer live anywhere near each other. I follow their blogs, share pictures and stories with them through e-mail.

This blurring of real and cyber is what makes it all so fascinating, isn’t it? Because these are real people, some of them you know for longer than ten years, but never actually see face-to-face or hear their voices. The shocking thing is, when I’ve met some of these people, they are exactly as I knew they’d be. It’s like I really have known them for all that time. There have been no surprises.

These are the experiences that make me more understanding (but still cautious) when my teenage son says he’ll get off the computer in a couple of minutes, “Because I’m right in the middle of talking to someone, mom!” It’s a different world we live in. One where location isn’t an obstacle. A world where we can make friends with people in other countries, or places that might as well be another country because you still can’t meet for lunch or get together to see a movie. A world where friends you leave behind aren’t left behind, and you can see immediate videos of their children, kids who you might otherwise never even meet. Or where your kids can follow the adventures of a former teacher on his blog after he moves away.

They can’t replace your community of right here-right now friends, but this cyber world can add to it. It’s supplementary support, in good times and in bad times. And, in a real world that’s often criticized for being too rushed and harsh, too impersonal and selfish, when a person can be brought to real tears over the prospect of losing a fake pet, I just can’t agree.

The internet is a tool. It will be what you use it for. If you use it to seal yourself off and lose sight of reality, then that’s what will happen. If you use it with compassion to reach out in friendship, then that’s what you’ll get in return. And, that’s very real.

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