Perceptual Distance

On social media and on news websites that offer the opportunity to comment, users, often appearing under screen nicks, type posts such as these "Congratulations Ms Celebrity on the birth of your child", "Condolences to the Family of the dead Mr Celebrity",  or "Happy Birthday Louis Armstrong", where Ms or Mr Celebrity appear as names of well  known figures.  This is no joke.   These are serious, sincere wishes.   What is going on?

Traditionally such wishes were delivered in person,  or by the postal service, or more recently by electronic mail.   And they were signed  by the sender,  somebody whom the addressee usually knew. And now?

I spoke about it to a friend.  People are posturing, I said to him, showing off their goodness,  even as they hide under nicknames.  No, no, he replied, or perhaps that's  part of it, but there is something deeper going on.   In addition to the celebrity worship, and the fantasy that many have that the celebrities and their private lives about which they know so much are important to themselves personally,  people get lost in this virtual reality of the Internet, as if there was an intelligent  being out there listening to them.

It reminds me of the early years of the cinema, he continued, when audiences spoke to the screen, advising the characters, warning them of dangers lurking.   There was a woman in the town where I grew up who was such a movie aficionado that the movie theater owner gave a free lifetime pass.  Now, this was of course 70 years after the early years of the cinema, and she was known to interact with the screen, shouting "watch out, he's around the corner!", "don't open the door!", and so on. We called her "No Perceptual Distance".  Yes, to this day people shout at their TVs, advise football players on the screen, let their emotions run watching live events, but these wishes typed on a cool medium of a computer are something new.  A virtual reality.

And since when did we start to wish dead people "Happy Birthday", I asked?