Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has several interesting insights on virtual and real worlds. The one we find particularly striking is her observation that both these realms are inter-subjectively connected. ‘Reality’ subsumes within it many abstractions that are ‘virtual’ to start with.

In the sphere of kinship, this interplay takes on interesting shapes. Kinship is composed of relationships between people that are imagined and structured in ways that play around the idea of nearness and distance in all kinds of ways. People who live in close proximity to each other also need to ‘imagine’ and ‘mediate’ their relationships through categorization and classification.

This can be full of painful psychological distance if the kinship ‘inter-face’ is based on categories that encourage hierarchy and distance – on the basis of gender, age or status.

Thus, people can live in the same house and be alienated from each other – with a zero-level of communication that no technological innovation can ever overcome.

She also points out that the idea of the ‘real’ itself is imbued with the weightiness of kinship categories in different ways. Thus the most ‘real’ relationships are imagined as being those of blood and family. The more distant ones – thus more ‘virtual’ – are of friendships.

However – anthropologists today have corrected many of their own pre conceptions about human modes of organization. They now acknowledge that kinship and friendship circles were equally relevant to our past histories – even for economic survival – and that to see one as more real than the other – in terms of classificatory modes – did not in anyway mean that we could not find the same level of intensity, emotional resonance and social dependence in both. In fact – since friendship spaces allowed for an expression of egalitarianism that traditional kinship did not – this world often had a lot of egalitarian resonance that provided relief to individuals caught in socially tight relations.

Today it has become easier for us to acknowledge the political values of friendship – as being as weighty and relevant to contemporary life in a double-edged way.

Societies in which traditional familial bonds are changing often represent the transformation in the idiom of friendship. It is easier for parents and children and husbands and wives to mark their modernity through the egalitarian resonances of ‘being friends’.

Virtual worlds thrive on the content of the communication that is crafted meaningfully through the imagery of friendship. It is crafted to deal with individual users through an inter-face of choice and freedom, as a world of possible friends and friendly voices. In other words, the world of communication technology is dominated by the culture of friendship.

What is equally significant is to see its impact on the way we perceive this technology. For one it renders the idea of distance as unimportant. This happens not only in the sense of transcending physical distance but by opening up a space for a connection on more egalitarian terms. That is what makes the internet such a potent political space. It is a space dominated by an alternative web of relations in which the virtual in both senses – para-real and beyond tightly knit social equations – gets to be expressed. This explains why smses being exchanged in a room or e-mails being exchanged through cabins in an office cannot be mechanically reduced to a retarded communication.

The virtual world has become a self-identified and – referential space of freedom and creativity through a more egalitarian mode of relating to people – that relies on the ‘virtual’ in a way that has always been part of any cultural history. It is as real as any other because it is fueled by human energies of communication that is motivated by the desire to connect with people in a free and flat way.

What Strathern reminds us that it is not the communication technology that is auto-producing these response. It is intensely complemented by a conscious desire to defend the ability of the technology to operate as such. This is so because it resonates so well with the political values that have become the dominant ones – especially for emerging generations.

What this suggests is that the political possibilities of friendship get tapped upon spontaneously through this fusion of social and technological forces. We don’t have to try too hard. In fact the commercial possibilities of the friendship industry are raking in the moolah for quick-thinking businesses which have understood this dimension of the internet.

But if we don’t see technology as an extension of conscious choice – in this case in the politically liberating language of egalitarian relationships – we often land up in unexpected places.

For example – literacy was often represented as the magic wand of transforming the world. The nation state was built around the energy of literacy which allowed – in the words of Benedict Anderson – to produce new emotive political imaginaries. According to Anderson – nations were new emotive abstractions that were facilitated by a new technology – literacy.

It would be useful to repeat the question that Strathern asked Anderson – what makes us think that small – scale societies and pre-national political identities didn’t need the faculty of the abstract imagination? If human relationships of the most basic kind are predicated on a culturally constructed vocabulary to actually encourage distance –(based on cultural status) then the need for uniting large political constructs through overcoming distance through communication cannot be a mere mechanical expansion of the idea.

It needs to be understood not through the technical expansion of the facility to communicate as much as its accompanying fore-ground score – the political values of the times, which may have, ironically been subverted through those very technologies. It is true that nations emerged along with the promise of various political freedoms. However, it is a different matter that they subsequently re-organized themselves on primordial identities of one kind or the other. Maybe because of the faulty slippage that took place in terms their understanding of technologies and political choices. They took the gift of literacy, modernized it through technological extensions and produced new versions of political-religious indoctrination that didn’t do much to extend the slogans that they brandied about. They controlled knowledge systems – directly or indirectly – and produced highly literate people with ancient political prejudices.

Today – as we imagine a less nationalized and territorialized world (as a political ideal – however contested) where technologies of all kinds have actually made it possible to cut through many firewalls – it is tempting once again to rely a lot on the imagined anti-bodies that exist within new communication technologies to help change the world.

What we have to be cautious about is what Strathern warns – we may imagine that we are getting globalized by a misplaced faith on the idea of distance and proximity as representing virtual and real dimensions.

We have often quoted Appadurai in this context – the fact of the matter is that locality is the inter-face through which the global gets experienced – wherever we are. The global is not the mechanical sum-total of many localities at all as a reductive understanding of communication, distance and proximity would have us think. Locality and the global are predicated on categories and modes of classification that can be anything – based on what we choose them to be.

Thus if we have to negotiate the politics of the contemporary world we have to do it through the interface of locality – even though we can see ‘global’ forces at work. Small neighbourhoods have become battlefields – without noisy warfare – just the rumble of speculation and the sound of construction.

The defenses that emerge against the war-mongers can come from unexpected directions – even virtual ones. For all of us who live half our lives in such worlds – and love it – we know that this space is not a result of cutting-edge technology alone – but the consequence of the choices that have cumulatively gone in making these technologies what they have become. The virtual world is a creative space which performs a function like a poem or story did in the past – in the primordial virtual worlds of our past lives – and the content of the poem is what we have to pay as much attention to.

The content is about ways of connecting with each other for its own sake, to use the energy unleashed through these connections in ways that we choose to.

If the dominant culture of virtual worlds is about friendship – and friendship was always gloriously virtual! – this can help transcend differences and hierarchies in all possible ways.

It can help carve a space where control and imposition is not the norm.

If the virtual world is about the reality of friendship then it opens up new ways of getting into the lives of each other.