A few nights ago I went to dinner with a group of friends and found myself talking about someone on one of the writing message boards I frequent. ìKateî my friend from the board and I are around the same age, started writing about the same time, and have tons of similar interests. On the website we have developed a friendship, and she had sent a message that day telling me a story that I then recounted to my friends.
My friends a mortgage officer and a preschool teacher who are not particularly tech savvy were a bit perplexed when they found out that my friend Kate was someone I only knew through my computer.
With sites like Myspace and Friendster many of our friendships are being reduced to mere cyber relationships. I have friends listed on my Myspace profile that I haven’t seen in almost ten years, but now that we’ve found each other on the Internet we have rekindled a friendship.
Online communities are growing by leaps and bounds. Video is becoming more and more prominent on the web as well making it easy now for you to not only read the worlds of a cyber friend you can now hear and see them as well.
Websites like Match and eHarmony have been around for years. Those sites are designed to create online relationships that are then taken into the “real world”. How many of our online relationships do we have that we have no intention of bringing into our ìreal worldî lifestyle?
I have quite a few friends even here on families.com, but I don’t ever think that I will meet them in the real world. We’ll never have dinner, or children will never go to camp together. May of my online frienships I consider close than my “real life” ones.
So is it all a good thing? Do you think our cyber relationships are taking the place of our real life ones or merely enhancing them?