Online friends
Dec. 14th, 2004 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
msagaraA question that came out of a discussion about on-line friends.
How many of your best friends are online only?
I value the entire online experience; it gets me thinking. It (often) makes me laugh,. I enjoy the kibitzing, and the ideas, that come from an environment in which both like minds and very unlike minds can meet, clash, and discuss. I value the sense of familiarity, the sense of community; you can certainly fit more people on a blog or an LJ board than you can in a room, and time becomes less critical in some ways -- if I'm suffering a bout of insomnia, the information is still there, and I can still respond to it, partaking in the discussion.
Discussions like these kept me sane when I first became a parent, because phone calls were impossible without interruption, and face it, baby screaming in your ear is not something you can ignore for more than about ten seconds, most of which are spent apologizing and getting off the phone.
But.
In a discussion with another online LJ denizen, something that struck me as odd came up: She said that many of her closest friends were people she'd never met or spoken to; that she couldn't actually put a voice to their online names or identities.
This made me pause. None of my best friends are online only. This doesn't mean that I don't value online friendships, but at some point, they cross the real world boundary in some less public way -- they almost have to.
Many of the friendships I value started in online venues (GEnie, for instance, but also in extended email interchanges), but developed over time with use of the phone and in-person meetings. I'm not entirely comfortable with the online-only version of friendship because what we present of ourselves -- both good and bad -- can often be so selective, we can't convey the whole picture. Nor can we derive the whole picture from another's selective information. We each come from different cultural contexts, and the way we use language -- to let off steam, for instance -- or the way we invoke privacy, are bound to be misunderstood by people who are completely reasonable, from their own cultural context. Or even just a different age; I cannot imagine what a conversation between my fifteen year old self and my forty year old self would be like, if it existed at all..
This may be some inherent flaw in the way I socialize. Or it could be my age.
So. Curious.
How many of your best friends are online only?
I value the entire online experience; it gets me thinking. It (often) makes me laugh,. I enjoy the kibitzing, and the ideas, that come from an environment in which both like minds and very unlike minds can meet, clash, and discuss. I value the sense of familiarity, the sense of community; you can certainly fit more people on a blog or an LJ board than you can in a room, and time becomes less critical in some ways -- if I'm suffering a bout of insomnia, the information is still there, and I can still respond to it, partaking in the discussion.
Discussions like these kept me sane when I first became a parent, because phone calls were impossible without interruption, and face it, baby screaming in your ear is not something you can ignore for more than about ten seconds, most of which are spent apologizing and getting off the phone.
But.
In a discussion with another online LJ denizen, something that struck me as odd came up: She said that many of her closest friends were people she'd never met or spoken to; that she couldn't actually put a voice to their online names or identities.
This made me pause. None of my best friends are online only. This doesn't mean that I don't value online friendships, but at some point, they cross the real world boundary in some less public way -- they almost have to.
Many of the friendships I value started in online venues (GEnie, for instance, but also in extended email interchanges), but developed over time with use of the phone and in-person meetings. I'm not entirely comfortable with the online-only version of friendship because what we present of ourselves -- both good and bad -- can often be so selective, we can't convey the whole picture. Nor can we derive the whole picture from another's selective information. We each come from different cultural contexts, and the way we use language -- to let off steam, for instance -- or the way we invoke privacy, are bound to be misunderstood by people who are completely reasonable, from their own cultural context. Or even just a different age; I cannot imagine what a conversation between my fifteen year old self and my forty year old self would be like, if it existed at all..
This may be some inherent flaw in the way I socialize. Or it could be my age.
So. Curious.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-12-14 07:58 pm (UTC)It's probably condescending to suggest that most of these folks haven't had the luck to meet someone IRL who could teach them the meaning of close friendship. So I won't say that. Besides, while it may be difficult to really 'be there for' someone when you only know them online, it definitely is not impossible. A lot of it depends on what you need out of a friendship. As an extreme case, I recall one story about a girl who OD'd while on IM. Her online friends used the Web to snag her phone number and call her family to get help.
For my part, all my 'permanent' friends are IRL. I've known 'temporary' friends online. They've been really good people, always ready to listen and offer advice, a lot of fun to talk to, maybe people I was lucky enough to help out in turn. But they stay in my life for a few months or a year, and then we just sort of part ways. If they stuck around, I know I'd feel an urge to meet them face-to-face at a certain point. I'd want to know the things about them, and I'd want them to know the things about me, that you can't learn through a computer.