As an example, take my time as an employee of the service industry. There, as salespeople, we were taught to talk, treat a customer as if the person was our friend in order to properly make a sale. However in such an environment we did not make friends, only clients. The reason for this is similar to why online friends are not truly ‘friends’: the interactions between one user and another are purely superficial unless they are coupled with real life interaction elsewhere.

In real life, in order to make friends we must perform actions to illustrate our interest in a person, and our view of said person is not formed by simply reading a laundry list of his/her opinions and thoughts on various, trivial subjects. For example, my best friend and initially began interacting due to a love of comic books, but our strength as friends comes from the fact that I believe he and I share a similar view on what it means to be a man. This is not a conversation though we have had, but through his actions and experiences I know to be true.

The internet is simply text. No body language, no reprisals or social cues, no ability to transmit action or deed. So in this way the internet is uniquely limited as a social network. You are watching, essentially, another person speak with abandon, whether or not he/she is being honest.

This is not to say it isn’t possible to become real life friends after chatting with someone online. Just that said friendship won’t actually exist until the encounter in reality is made.

That Internet friends can become “real” friends is not the subject of dispute. Rather, I argue that “Internet friend” is a label not synonymous with “friend”, as “Internet” is a qualifier in the former term for a reason. This is not to say that one cannot create favorable acquaintances with individuals online, which might eventually evolve into a friendship down the road after one meets the person in question, but placing the same emphasis on one’s Internet acquaintances as one does their real-life friends is a little irresponsible. Perhaps this all comes down to how stringent one defines “friend”, however, which I believe is a term too easily given in American society these days. That is to say, people throw the term “friend” around willy-nilly, and this de-emphasizes what it means to be and have a real friend.

-asses = assess -a dogmatic = as dogmatic

that was just bothering the hell out of me.

“The basis of fear is not that people don’t communicate with others, it’s that they don’t communicate with others as they would in real life.”

• That is an assumption and not a rule, don’t you think? It is not imposable to be yourself in “chat form”

I guess at this point you can tell I am not of the same opinion and I am one of those people somewhat offended.

I have the best RL friends in the world. I also have been very fortunate over the past year or so to have made a few Internet friends that have come to mean a great deal to me. Some I have met, some I have yet to meet. In the cases of the ones I have met, It was rather a seamless transition from “Internet friends” to “Real Life friends” each time, so I have found in my experience that people can be themselves “in chat”.

“The Internet masks people, and so building a relationship based on a very limited experience with someone (in this case, text communication) fails to give a proper, useful image of that person.”

-I can agree that this statement MAY be true in many cases, as well I suppose if you have trouble trusting people or even if that the communications turn out to be lies, less than honest, or someone is not being wholly themselves, it would not “be real”.

Point is, I see no harm in starting a dialog with someone you have never meet in the flesh, and there is also the option of starting voice dialog by phone and going from there, as by then at least you should know whether or not you can actually communicate with that person and not just sit there filling the air with zero’s. You can also risk free, meet these new friends and see if the “person” fits the “persona” and the blessing there is you have many of the superficial and trivial assessments and BS out of the way.

Remember no one ever you said you HAVE to call these people your friends and as to whether or not you do, it probably just comes down to your ability to asses and trust people. Keep in mind “Internet friends are not real” is your opinion and not a fact, but feel free to be a dogmatic as you like.

-what ever