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Hmmm, it occurred to me today – in one of those sideways leaps my mind sometimes makes – that I have more e-friends than face-to-face friends. Two dimensional friendships with thumbnail photos and wall-to-wall chatting. The fruits of online social networking.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy and value these friendships. But the phantom nature of them gets me to wondering. E-mail, e-banking, e-commerce, e-meetings, e-friends… Where will it all lead? So much of our life happens virtually these days.

Are we experiencing the e-volution of our world?

I’m not anti technology. The Internet is a technological wonder. It shrinks distance and condenses time allowing us to interact with people we may never have the opportunity to meet. But it is reshaping our human relationships in ways that give me pause to wonder.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I zap you an e-mail – just a “Hi, how are you?” note. But something in that e-mail stings you like a cyber bumblebee. You think: What did he mean by that? Is he sniping at me? You can’t hear the inflection in my voice or see the mischievous twinkle in my eye that tells you I’m just poking fun.

So you fire back an e-mail with a little zinger of its own. Not knowing I inadvertently offended you, I think: What’s his problem? A few more salty e-mails ricochet back and forth off a dozen servers. The result: we decide to strike each other off our list of friends. One face-to-face meeting could have straightened things out. But it will never happen.

Let’s pursue the metaphor a bit further. A central principle in the theory of evolution is “natural selection”. Favorable inherited traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms while unfavorable heritable traits become less common.

So what kind of traits will be naturally cyber-selected in the e-volution of our world? Emotions get flattened in the bandwidth of e-relationships. Will they become a disadvantage in an e-world? Perhaps highly rational and non-intuitive personalities will become the norm. Relationships would by definition become more superficial.

The prototypical e-world person would spend significant amounts of time in intimate relationship with a computer screen. In fact, it’s happening already. Take a look at coffee shops – traditionally human watering holes where we meet to talk and relate. Look around next time you’re in Tim’s. How many people do you see sitting alone sipping their coffee while working on their laptop?

Could it be that the e-gocentric personality is the one that will be favoured by natural cyber-selection in the e-volution of our world?

Am I overreacting? Perhaps. But an old nursery rhyme comes to mind:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Substitute “compassion” for “a nail” and “intimacy” for “the shoe” and rewrite the rhyme. You do the math.

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