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Internet friendships/relationships: Your thoughts?
Kyougu
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I been mulling this topic in mind for a while, and finally decided to post. With the internet allowing people all over the world to communicate, and strangers to meet even more easily than ever before over common hobbies and interests, it's no surprise that alot of online friendships and relationships have sprungs up. Hell, I had a couple of both kinds (though just online relationship.) I also known people who looked at me weird when I mention I have an online friend, and on the other hand, I know a couple people who only seem to have pure online friends.
My question is, are these connections as real as the ones we make in real life? Sure, you may talk with someone online over irc, or im every day, but do you really know that person? Is it healthy to make attachments over people who may really just be strangers? Or really, is it no big deal?
My question is, are these connections as real as the ones we make in real life? Sure, you may talk with someone online over irc, or im every day, but do you really know that person? Is it healthy to make attachments over people who may really just be strangers? Or really, is it no big deal?
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people are people be they on-line or next door.
It's funny meeting people from the internet. You find that you may know someones deepest secrets but don't know the most basic things about them like what kind of car they drive. It's like the exact inverse of a normal friendship.
Regardless, I
I think online relationships are just as valid, but having only online relationships is a big red flag to me. I met my wife online, and we just clicked better than any girls I met in real life. What makes me not a nerdy weirdo is that I actually went out and met girls in real life too.
A lot of making it work has to do with how much you're willing to put into any kind of long-distance relationship (pen'n'paper, phone or interwub). You can stop writing letters, close your IM app or hang up a phone, but you can't stop talking to someone across the dinner table. If you're willing to treat the online relationship as if it were just as valid, you get the same kind of returns.
It's interesting, I have more in-depth (online) conversations with you all on PA than I do my friends from my hometown, even though my friends from my hometown are on pretty much as often as any of you, and I'm pretty much the same damn person in "real life" (as it were), personality-wise, that I am here.
Dunno why. They even started a discussion board that is vaguely similar to D&D, but they're nowhere near as diligent as me about replying to shit.
Huh, I never really thought of that aspect. Though something about IM that can't match real conversations is that you always have plenty of time to think about what you're going to say the next thing.
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I had some pretty serious ones in my time. Course my real internet socializing time was in a teenage channel so it was an orgy of backstabbing and gossip.
But really, if I was religiously inclined, I'd offer incense and lamb meat to my router every week.
Not unless they're highly motivated. Offline enemies probably know where you are and what you look like. Online ones have to seek you out, which takes time and resources. Really, if they're that motivated you're probably screwed. Just don't make enemies.
Yes, but lets say your somewhere like at PAX, and you come across a huge enemy that you knew from online. Does the enemy status immediately sink in?
It'd probably go more like it seems to for Jerry: ie, immediate and slightly embarrassing appeasement.
I think that online friendships are just as valid as IRL friendships, and I'm glad that I've been able to meet so many people through the internet. In addition, I think that since I'm generally a pretty introverted person making friends online has been helpful in developing some social skills that have made it easier for me to meet new people offline as well.
And even though I met my wife in person, we spent the first two months about 150 miles apart, and spent the majority of the "getting to know you" phase online.
I've also gone on countless dates thanks to dating sites and whatnot. It's a decent way to meet girls I think especially if you are a keyboard wizard such as myself.
I have a lot more friends online than I do off line. One reason being that it's easier to find people who share a specific interest online than it can be in person, and also, you aren't necessarily subject to the day to day things that can make it difficult for friends to make time for each other. I used to have a ton of local friends, but some moved away, and others changed or we just lost touch. That happens online too, but it isn't always as painful a process. Or something.
That said, there are degrees of friendship. Both online and off. There are those people that I just kind of casually know via forums. Or those that I chat with every now and then when we're both on AIM. Or those that I talk to via LiveJournal. Or those that I talk to on the phone. I haven't met any of these people in real life, and there are some that I have no interest in meeting that way. But there are some that I wish I lived closer to, because I think our friendship could be pretty kickass (or rather, more kickass?) if we could hang out in real life.
But.. The one thing that will forever make a clear distinction between the two is the ease of which either party can end an online friendship (or relationship). You can just up and vanish; I've done so, unintentionally, to a few very dear online friends, simply because life got hellish and by the time I got things sorted out I hadn't caught up with changes to screen names and so on. They were lost to me, forever.
It has happened to me in return, as well. People I've spoken with online for years, through multiple games and IM clients and forums, have just disappeared without warning. Or cut down seriously on their online time.
It doesn't happen like this in real life. I mean, if you really want to end a friendship you can make it happen (though this is usually catalyzed by some unpleasantness), but close friends' lives get intertwined with yours. You hang out with the same social circles. You go to the same bars. You take the same classes. You do favors and get helped in return. And you can't just click off reality and walk away to do something else; reality is always there, and if your friend wants to call you six months later just to catch up, that's not hard.
It's incredibly hard to rekindle online friendships once contact has been lost for a long period of time.
This, more than anything, is the biggest distinction between the two. You can only share so much of your life with an online friend, while it's very easy to invite real-life friends over for barbecue and beer.
On the black screen
Indeed. When I met people at PAX though, shaking their hand was enough to move them from the "hey I hardly know the guy" stack to the "I'd back him in a bar fight" pile. It was very cool to show up and get along with that many people right away.
Yeah, meeting people online is fine, but needs to be a harbinger of real life interactions.
How true. I feel as if I've made some genuine friends over the internet, and I feel as if I can tell you how they'd react to a situation but when it comes to the things closest to the surface, I am in the dark. The group of friends of whom I speak really grew on me that year we were 'together', and while we would admit some things to each other whom we'd otherwise not tell others (what we really thought about things, in general) we always skittered around the more personal questions. When someone would mention something to do with their lives, something that their IRL friends new, it was akin to a revelation. When someone gave you their name, it was a privilege (we never told each other our real names. Such confidences were, for some reason, done on other sites and pretty much directed towards a specific person).
With that in mind, I have a lot more casual friends over the net. Meeting them would be cool, but there are other friends whom I'd be positively ecstatic to meet. In fact, me and that tight-knit group of buds at times discussed what would happen if we met, and talked about possible ways of getting together. But with everyone being scattered across the country, and indeed, a few were in different countries, so the idea was never taken seriously.
If that makes any sense.