Imagination is the stuff that cyberspace in general and online relationships ships in particular are made of. Nevertheless, people take their online relationships seriously and experience real intense emotions. The advantage of online imagination in improving reality is also its drawback: people may have difficulties distinguishing between imaginary and actual circumstances. This chapter examines the nature and consequences of online imagination.

Emotions and imagination

Imagination may be broadly characterized as a capacity to consider possibilities that are not actually present to the senses. In this broad characterization, which is epistemological in nature, memory and thought are types of imagination, since in both we consider such possibilities. A narrower characterization of imagination, which facilitates distinctions between imagination and capacities such as memory and thought, adds an ontological criterion to imagination: imagination is an intentional capacity referring to nonexistent events – or at least those believed by us to be such events.

In the narrow sense, imagination refers to an object that is not present to the senses and that has never existed (or that, on the basis of our current knowledge, has a very low probability of existing). This type of imagination can be further divided into two kinds: (a) the subject does not know about the falsity of the imagined content, and (b) the subject does know about the falsity of the imagined content.