Month: March 2019

NYTimes: This Friendship Has Been Digitized

This Friendship Has Been Digitized www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/this-friendship-has-been-digitized.html

I was surprised and moved, for example, to learn from a BBC report about a young man named Mats Steen whose body was severely disabled by Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Before his death at 25, he had accumulated many devoted friends in the virtual space of “World of Warcraft” as a well-loved muscular avatar.

On his blog, Steen wrote: “There my handicap doesn’t matter, my chains are broken and I can be whoever I want to be. In there I feel normal.” Some of his closest friends online did not even know about his disability, and they became close because their nightly communications jumped straight over the usual biases of gender, race, religion, place, age, ability, and got on with the mysterious bonding of souls, via the shared minutiae of everyday struggle. Some of Steen’s online friends flew to the Netherlands to attend his funeral and pay respects to his family. As a measure of friendship, that’s way more impressive than bringing someone soup.

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