Today a colleague of mine used an abbreviation online that I needed to look up. I never was able to locate it, but while I searched, I found this one:
ly – love you
I wondered aloud on twitter that I’d never encountered this, and this thought caused me to pause to ponder whether expressions of love online are possible. “I’ve never seen that,” is what I heard from most people on twitter, the rest responding with humour.
Online communication, and in particular the kind practiced on irc, is, in my experience, funny, witty, clever, engaging, technical, often childish, and sometimes deeply meaningful; however, I can count on one hand the number of times it has offered a moment in which to express love between friends. I don’t mean sexual love, but rather a deep friendship.
Perhaps it’s that most relationships one engages in online are not truly deep; perhaps it’s that the public nature of the communication precludes certain kinds of more personal engagement; perhaps it’s not really possible to express oneself this way online. Whatever is happening, it’s interesting to think about online communication tools, what they make available and what they remove from the functioning of friendships online.
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I most often see it expressed this way: <3
For me personally, expressions of love online are deeply private, personal things, and as such are never communicated on public channels: they’re either conveyed over IM, email, or through one-to-one communication channels in chat spaces. The particular text is always unique for each of my friends or family members; out-of-context, the words or emoticons might seem trite, but it’s the rarity of using them and the shared understanding that have made them meaningful to us.
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[...] Humphrey recently wrote a post on the possibility of expressing love online. His question, essentially, was this: can humans genuinely express love (deep friendship, [...]