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I've got a friend who lives across the street. We don't see each other that often – I've been dating my MacBook pretty heavily – but sometimes at night, I see a candle in her window. It is romantic and reassuring in a way that is hard to express. It's an urban version of camping in Algonquin Park and seeing a fire in the distance. Last time it happened, I lit some candles and put them in my window. I didn't care if she saw them. Just knowing we had some solidarity was enough.

When I have a bout of insomnia, I sometimes log onto Facebook. If I'm really lucky, someone I know will also be there, writing about their insomnia. It's another kind of candle in the window. Even if no one is online, I feel the massed bulk of all my Facebook friends like a ghost army behind me in my darkest hour. There is some comfort in it, although I'm never quite sure how illusory it is.

Because frequently when I actually try to make things happen via Facebook, the social cohesion dissolves like a handful of wet toilet paper. Any Facebook veteran will tell you, don't plan an event using the “events” function, because people don't take it seriously. Half of them will not even check their invites. But even if you try to co-ordinate something as a group e-mail, people, I find, rarely follow through. It's just hard to muster a sense of duty or a strong enough feeling of kinship via the Internet.

Jason Logan / The Globe and Mail

jason logan

Friendships are easier online: there, you can be the best version of yourself. How many times have you walked away from an exchange and half an hour later thought of the perfect repartee? On Facebook, this delay is meaningless. On Facebook, I'm Oscar Wilde. In real life, the best comeback I can come up with in .2 seconds is often “whatever” or “shut up!” On Facebook, your friends' annoying habits – of interrupting you; of going into a sudden, inexplicable sulk; of appearing judgmental – don't exist to the same extent.

But even though these friendships are easier, they are also more sterile, and less binding. We've become wispier versions of ourselves. As if aware of this, we constantly seem to need reassurance about what kind of person we are. It's no accident that Facebook quizzes – telling us what colour we are, what character from Mad Men, etc. – proliferate, even though they aren't telling us anything we didn't already know. We seem to need the computer to tell us that we exist.

Never was this more evident than when Google Streetview launched: Suddenly my Facebook newsfeed was glutted with photos of people's own houses. Never mind that they could have taken a photo of their house and posted it the previous day. No, it was as if now, somehow, their house existed in a way it never did before. It seems we suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome: The computer dilutes our essence, but we continually look to the screen for proof of our own depth.

But then there's the candle in the window, and all that it means: that we are frail, fleshly beings that, like any animal, need tangible comforts like heat and light. That is one thing that Google Streetview could never capture.

Follow Lisan Jutras on Twitter @lisanjutras