The internet has become an essential part of everyday life of a huge number of individuals all over the world more than two decades ago. It broke into almost all the spheres of life of modern society, creating professions, providing information, and making connections previously people could hardly think about. The burst of social networks and blogs has brought communication opportunities on a completely new level. People started to make friends in the countries they hardly heard about and of the interests, they even could not imagine. Sometimes individuals go into online relationships that deep, that it is getting hard to tell them from real life relationships. Friends they make online seem to be more real than the people they meet every day in school, college or workplace. The modern world tends to the situation when people develop the greatest empathy towards their online friends because it seems that the ratio and the deepness of these relationships can be controlled; written and posted information gives more time to analyze and be more selective towards individuals people want to communicate with; and online friendship provides with access to a some kind previously forbidden world.
The present work majorly will be based on the article Online Friendship Formation, Communication Channels, and Social Closeness and the interview conducted to Kate Stevenson, who is a long time social network user. Kate’s approach to making online friends is based on common interests as well as on the way a person of interest expresses his or her thoughts, his or her behavior and loyalty to other’s opinion. The amount and the quality of the content the person shares also play their role in making Kate’s decision. “Actually, the first glance on the timeline gives the idea if the person is interesting to me and if he or she is worth following,” says Kate. If the further content still invokes her interest, and she shares the individual’s way of thinking or the situation described is familiar to her and she feels that she is likely to discuss it; as well as she feels some kind of empathy towards the person she follows, she starts to socialize. Cases like this sometimes develop into an online friendship. Kate is a relatively sociable person and has quite a few offline friends. Her social network life has become active when she moved to another city leaving all her friends and family behind. The thinks that was the way of overcoming homesickness. The article actually supports this assumption as “individuals who are close to their face-to-face friends will have less need to develop online friendships” (Mesch and Talmud 31) and online socializing is common to people who lack understanding and communication in their real life.
Though Kate talks about herself as about a long time social network user, she says that there are only a few people of those she met online, she can classify as friends. These people gave her support and understanding in some kind of struggling situations during her lifetime. She experiences warm feelings and inclination towards them, and would gladly meet them offline, spend some time together and provide with certain help. Actually, this fact correlates with a statement from an article reflecting that the stronger are the ties, the deeper will be the sphere of personal and intimate communication (Mesch and Talmud 41). Kate also mentioned that there were few times when she shared an intimate information with people online, she fell inappropriate to discuss with offline friends. The information was not of critical content, but she would rather discuss it with people she never met in real life. On one hand, it might be concluded that Kate had never experienced forming ties that strong to discuss questions of intimate nature with her offline friends. On the other hand, acute and personal questions are more eagerly discussed with people whom we barely know, anonymous people, whom we will tell our deepest fears and concerns, knowing that we will never meet them again (Joinson 210).
Thus, Kate moved to another city she stays in touch with her old friends, but because of the distance, the most appropriate way to communicate is online. As a result, some people who were close to her previously find it difficult to communicate often, but some others, who were not close before, appeared to become supportive and understanding. Relationships with them shifted to other, a bit higher level, revealing some attractive personal sides Kate was not aware of before, as she was communicating them offline. In addition, it supports the research data that the closeness at different degrees can be both observed in online and offline communication (Amichai-Hamburger, Kingsbury and Schneider 38). She also became closer to her parents and more understandable towards them as their online communication developed.
People tend to form deep ties through online communication because of some personal crisis, lack of offline understanding, and the feeling of constant or temporary loneliness. The information gained online can lead the attentive user to the formation of bonds of close friendship, develop trustful relationships with a person you might never meet offline. Some personal features of the person of interest both attractive and repellent might be discovered through online communication. All this leads to deeper understanding and thus forming stronger ties.
Works Cited
Amichai-Hamburger, Yair, Mila Kingsbury, and Barry H. Schneider. “Friendship: An old concept with a new meaning?” Computers in Human Behavior 29.1 (2013): 33-39. Print.
Joinson, Adam. Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology, Oxford, UK: OUP Oxford, 2007. Print.
Mesch, Gustavo S., and Ilan Talmud. “Online friendship formation, communication channels, and social closeness.” International Journal of Internet Science 1.1 (2006): 29-44. Print.