Online friends outshine real life friends
14 Aug 2009 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: facebook, friendship, hidden identity, interpersonal relationships, online friends
So you decide that you are lonely and bored and have nothing better to do with your bandwidth. Nothing interesting is happening on the news or on your Facebook or Myspace profile pages so you decide to go hunt for new friends online. You discover that an old schoolmate of yours who you never spoke to much at school is on Facebook.
Although you do not share anything in common you decide to invite her as a friend. She accepts and you enjoy the pleasure of chatting to someone new and your boredom quickly disappears. This suddenly becomes a trend and before you know it you have increased your friend list by 20 people within a space of a month.
There is nothing wrong with having many friends on social networks, after all that’s their purpose; to keep people connected. The question however lies with the moral aspect of having so many people who can be accredited as your friends without you ever sharing a physical bond. Friendship can be defined as an interpersonal relation which can be a relatively long-term association between two or more people. This association may be based on emotions like love and liking, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment.
Online friends have more in common
According to a recent UK MySpace study of over 16,000 social network users, the majority of people interviewed revealed that they had more in common with their online friends than real day to day friends. The study revealed that a good portion of this group admits to feeling more comfortable sharing and communicating with friends online than they do when logged out of cyberspace. 36% of the respondents said they found it easier to talk about themselves online than in the real world, leading them to share more about themselves using technology.
The question as to whether this sort of behaviour is healthy can be placed for public debate. Social networks allow individuals to create their own ideal identities and purposefully leave out any unpleasant aspects of their character. The majority of the people who use social networks hardly reveal any information about themselves which they view might tarnish their image or character perception.
What is wrong with that? One may ask. Well if one is to hide certain aspects of their life, such as friends and family from another person, can the two people be considered to have an interpersonal relationship? In reality a person who you do not know well is considered an accomplice and one hardly spends a lot of time chatting to or socializing with accomplices. However on the internet the interpersonal dynamics change drastically, people spend hours chatting and socialising with people they do not even know that well.
Social networks also have the advantage of allowing people the freedom that the real world does not create room for. Forty-year-old men can become a teenagers again. Wedding bands aren’t at all visible in the on-line world. And everyone’s body tends to become thin and smaller when they log on.
Killing physical relationships
In a recent article by Reuters, The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales raised his concerns about the excessive use of emails and mobile phone text messaging is creating shallow friendships and undermining community life. These sentiments can also be linked to social networks.
“I think there’s a worry that an excessive use, or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we’re losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that’s necessary for living together and building a community,” said the Archbishop.
So the question still stands. Is having a large number of online friends destroying interpersonal skills or helping those people who are naturally shy and prefer communicating under hidden identities a chance of enlarging their social networks?
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