Online relationships is it possible?

[Julian Cole]

As my first forum post I thought I would pose a question that is very relevant to social networking sites and this zing.

Is a purely online friendship possible?

When I classify a online friendship, it is friendship that occurs online, a relationship that has had no offline contact previously or no plans to meet up offline, A friendship with regular contact over an extended period of time.

When you ask a person offline what is the key to their friendship. Often the answer will be we have great conversations, we do interesting stuff together, they are always there for me. All these functions can be produced in an online relationship.

What are the elements of an offline relationship that you cannot create online. One of the things that is missing, is human contact but why does that stop us from a online relationship?

Would love to know other peoples thoughts.

[Amelia Torode]

I think it's an interesting question. I was talking to my husband about this yesterday, he was asking who "Beeker" was who had commented on one of my blog posts. I replied that Beeker was my first Blogger friend. I have never actually met Beeker, though we were at the same conference but I do think of her as an online blogging friend. But friendships, online or offline, take time to develop. It takes time to move from being a blogging acquaintance to be a blogging buddy. I have only been blogging since November, and really only started to really get into my style and approach since Feb/March, so I think that I have the beginnings of online friendships happening.
Of course a purely online friendship is possible, but it's nice when it can move into the real world too.

[John Keehler]

There's a great report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that addresses some similar issues. It's worth checking out: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Internet_ties.pdf

I think they also did one with teens and social networking that was pretty interesting. Social networking is certainly a tool for people to "manage" their friendships like never before.

[Sarah Drake]

Scary as it sounds, purely online relationships are inevitable. And already exist today. Most of my friends live in different cities and countries. I do not see them for years but maintain daily contact with them - through messaging and social networks. I would classify those as online relationships. And I would classify this relationship as purely online... at least until I move to Australia. :)

[Julian Cole]

That is true, but i think both relationships you talk of have elements of offline connection (In the first instance i think you knew the person and then made the relationship online (this is a presumption, please correct me if i am wrong) and in the second example there is an element of trying to make the relationship go offline with you moving to Australia).

There is that old communication rule that 80% of communication is non verbal, therefore when a friendship occurs online you are only seeing 20% of the communicated message. it is very hard to get the gamut of your emotions through in written word.

I still dont think this is the major difference stopping pure online friendships though?

[John Grant]

I know quite a few people online-only because of geography. But there is a kind of impetus to meet. & with people in Europe/London you almost inevitably do hook up.

Marshall McLuhan wrote interesting stuff about teleprecense. There was a virtual meeting room set up in a number of nuclear war locations (silos, whitehouse basement). In each room there was one empty chair and five or so manequins. The meetings worked by projecting video of the faces of each of the others live onto the mannequins; a wierd take on video conference. The reason they did it is that they found that when the group felt eaxch others' precense in this realistic way, they were much more decisive than just on the phone. Might be your nonverbal thing? By I like the particularity/wierdness of the example.

[Douglas Atkin]

We're hard wired as social animals, if you listen to evolutionary psychologists. And we grew that way by face to face interaction with all the body language, mirror neurons, smells and other unconcsious-communication stuff that we're just now learning about. Writing and even language has come late in human development. That's why we can yearn for hooking up vs. just texting or even video ichat-ing.

I've just joined a dot.com that gets people to meet online so that they can meet in groups offline around common interests...everything from knitting to obama to finding other vampires (I was going to consult for them but given community is what I've been mostly thinking about for the past few years, it seemed daft not to join the experiment). The 'feeling' of community creeps up on members after they've participated for a while...something they realize they've missed despite the 400 Myspace 'friends' they have and the social networks they've joined just like this one. Offline community will never go away. Check out this ideology I invited a Meetup (the name of our company) organizer to write in the attached file.