This is old, archived material. My current home page is here, and more recent writing is here.

[ What's this? | Old stuff | Index | Email ]  18/1/96

net.friends

or months now I've been meaning to write something about making friends on the net. About how suddenly a deep friendship can materialise with some stranger thousands of miles away, and about how easy it is to share one's deepest secrets with a person one will probably never meet. But also about how fragile such ASCII friendships can be and how easily they can fall apart without Real Life ties to support them.

Of course, friendships on the net don't necessarily have to be so close. There are people I'd count as friends who I've 'met' many times in chat spaces like Spacebar, who I feel pleased to see whenever I log on, and who I've chatted to many times over the past year. But at the same time, I know extremely little about these people, who are often little more to me than their chosen names no matter how often I exchange meaningless chat with them. The increasingly common development of maintaining a home page makes characters seem like real people, but simply knowing about someone's favourite bands and web sites does not make a friendship.

It's the easyness with which people can open up their hearts to complete strangers which helps forge deep friendships surprisingly quickly. In much the same way that folks IRL would feel easier about telling problems to, say, a doctor, or someone other than their closest of friends, it's amazingly easy to open up to someone you're never likely to meet. On a couple of occasions Išve been hanging around on Club Wired when someone has appeared simply because they want to unburden themselves of their problems, and just talk to someone about them. They were glad to have someone there willing to listen and offer advice, and not being face to face makes the whole deal that much easier to cope with. On these occasions, I hardly heard from them again, but it demonstrates the intimacy that can instantly be created by net communication.

Aside from this, the distance between the two friends can make a difference, in that both sides know they're not likely to meet. Nearly all the friends I've made on the net have been female, and I know most of them have largely male sets of net.friends - the lack of pressure in such friendships, knowing that each side isn't trying to get off with the other, certainly eases things along.

I guess then, it's trust that builds these friendships. Knowing that neither side is carrying things on just because they fancy the other, the gradual (or occasionally not so gradual) awareness that this almost-stranger will be supportive no matter what you tell them, and that if all else in the real world goes wrong, there'll be a few Kb of friendly text from another world waiting in your e-mail box before too long.

ust as these friendships can swiftly become extremely close, what can feel like a life-long friendship can end, either gradually, or surprisingly quickly. Today I felt like I almost lost a net.friend, when she lost her job, and also consequently her net access. I had a sudden feeling of helplessness at being unable to comfort someone who had always seemed so physically close. By dropping into Spacebar at the right time I'd be sure of a greeting, or failing that, a quick e-mail would always reach her within minutes. But all of a sudden she'd gone from being seconds away, to being on the other side of the globe. Another friend 'vanished' almost as quickly when she quit her job to go travelling, and it can be awfully tough when someone whose e-mail welcomed you every couple of days suddenly disappears from your life.

If such friendships have truly grown strong enough, then they should live without the medium of the net, but as we know, communication by any other means isn't quite the same, losing the combination of speed and intimate separation that the internet does so well at providing. It would be horribly like a Wired writer of me to say that this will drastically change everyone's lives in the future ("the speed with which friendships will now form and dissipate will cause society to become fragmented and people will become wary of being intimate with one another"). And I really don't want to think about such a thing. The thought of making more friendships as close and as much fun as those I've made in my first year on the net is wonderful. But at the same time, I'm horribly scared of losing any more friends.

[ What's this? | Old stuff | Index | Email ]