Rebecca's Whinging Part 2

I hear all the time about how technology is the death of socialisation, that no one talks face to face anymore. People who spend too much time on the phone or on the computer are told to go out and join the real world.

There is this mentality that online friends aren't real friends. I once read this article that said the internet is running socialisation because now people can just communicate with those people with whom they are similar to, rather than being forced to communicate with people of different interests.

Well it’s true I mainly use the internet to communicate with those in my shared fandom. And it is also true that I have trouble communicating with people my own age because of a lack of shared interests. And it is also true that most of my close friendships have shared little of the same interests and were more compatible on personality traits. So if you look at internet friendships in this way I see that they may come off as superficial.

However it is also true that the past few friends I’ve made in real life have had shared interests. And it is also true that even amongst people with shared interests there are many different outlooks, opinions and cultures, as any member of a fanbase can attest. Also it happens so much in life that most communities formed ARE based on common interests and culture. Birds of a feather flock together they say. There wouldn’t be any subcultures if people didn’t just stick to what they knew.

And this is what the internet is; a collection of communities. We have our jokes, our own celebrities and our own cultural knowledge. I can tell you now through my attempts at being social in high school. If you have nothing in common, conversations become boring. I tried to make friends but most of the conversations with girls my age were about:

a. shopping b. music or c. Gossip about people I didn’t know.

I don’t like shopping, I don’t listen to modern music and I don’t care about the everyday life drama of people I don’t know. And yes I realise the irony of this every time I talk about my everyday life social issues but I at least am using them to illustrate a point.

One strength of online communities I’ve found is that trust is much easier to form on online games. That sounds weird because I don’t know anything about these people but I’m talking about how its easier for me to gauge the sincerity of people. If someone is going to mess with you in a game, you’re going to figure it out pretty quickly once they start getting you killed. People in online games don’t usually go the emotional torment route, they’re usually more overt. Likewise someone who agrees to play a part in your crazy roll playing is less likely to be messing with you and more likely to be really bored.

So many times online I’ve just started doing something nuts and then had people join along with me. These people, I can tell are sincere. Then for a whole night we’re best friends, travelling in a pack, annoying people playing the game normally and when morning comes we disband and never speak to one another again. These instant friendships may seem fake but they’re merely a micro version of real life friendships. I have had many friends who I was close to in school and then when I moved schools or left schools, never heard from again. Just like I’ve had many friends on various games and social networks who I was close to but when I left the game/network/whatever, I never heard from them again. It just got too difficult to keep up communications. The internet is like the schoolyard. It’s just a place you and others gather for your own interests and while there you socialise, you make friends and you become close. But once you leave the school, you’ll still find you’ll lose contact with most of them. Even with the internet.