This thread is about how relationships (not
relationships) work over the internet, e.g friendships
Basically I'm bored at work and on the computer, thought I would write a thread, and this is something I have been thinking about a lot recently.
I want to discuss what the main differences are between people you know online (or mostly online) and those irl, the different ways in which relationships evolve and the different kinds of communities which are created. I've read a couple of texts on internet communities but these are generally obsolete* and seem to be written for people needing an introduction to the subject rather than people who are involved in it every day. As of this line I don't know how the rest of this post is going to go but I'm going to start by statings some "facts" and then drawing zany conclusions!
One major difference is the size of the communities compared to social groups which people are involved in irl. Something like SA or slashdot is absolutely huge and bigger than any purely social group that someone would be involved in normally. There needs to be a distinction made between forums like this and ones like (for example) this one. SA is a community that spreads through it's reputation and is more or less constructed to be a good internet forum from the bottom up, with their harsh modding, many rules and taboos etc. This one has sprung up from a shared interest and has evolved naturally from there with the minimum of input from any higher power.
The reasons that internet communities become far larger than any real life equivalent are pretty obvious, but I'll state them anyway. Firstly, if it's a specialist group then it has the entire world to "recruit" from and therefore has a far larger group of people who might join to appeal to, whereas one in real life would be restricted by geography and practicality. As well as the potential to be useable to anyone with access to a computer they have the added advantage of people being able to contribute to the communities effectively
while they are doing something else**. The lack of inconvenience associated with this kind of social interaction is clearly a big factor in how often people can participate.
This has another effect in that specialised communities are far more likely to be created online (also partly for reasons of anonymity, I would imagine). What this means in more practical terms however, is that as a community has a far greater potential userbase, it can generally acquire the "pick of the bunch" and if it is created for some specific purpose then it is far easier to attract a group of experts (or psuedo-experts) than it would be if it were a real life situation with all the limitations which come with that.
The lack of physical contact and basic restrictions of any communication to a purely written form (and without even the personalities of different handwriting) obviously inhibits socialising. Without body language, tone of voice etc. then you are never going to be able to get as much information across as you would normally. This problem has often been pointed out, normally by someone saying something like "sarcasm doesn't work on the internet", which isn't entirely true, but it would be difficult to deny that sarcasm works
far less well at the very least. This has been combatted by all sorts of innovations (smileys, bold/italics, the use of different phrasing to that which you would normally use to denote irony***), but in my opinion meaning is often far more difficult to convey through the use of pure text, despite innovations.
Now, to come back to my original point of how relationships are formed online, my main assertion here is that they are normally formed much
slower. I would put this down to the lack of physical contact/communication more than anything else, as I can't think of an alternative that would reasonably describe how long it takes to form what I would consider a strong friendship online as opposed to one irl. I know im making up terminology here but I hope you all know what I mean.
I lied in the paragraph above, I can think of one more alternative reason for it taking time to build relationships, but I think it works in tandem with the physical aspect rather than discounting it. This is the extent to which most forums on the internet (not chatrooms/channels) are essentially fields of debate rather than places designed for social interaction. You get less "banter" if everything you say should contribute to the discussion and be worthwhile. If you listen to a conversation between two friends irl (or have one yourself, I suppose) then you normally notice that a large portion of it is utter rubbish, maybe it's funny, maybe it's not, but I can only assume that it helps to build social bonds between people. This is sorely lacking on this forum (though not on irc \o/), although I wouldn't want it any other way. I shouldn't forget to mention some exceptions to this rule (PB, BYOB) and I'm sure there are innumerable others. This forum even used to be far more amenable to talking bollocks than it is now (sup Mark). To clarify this paragraph, I think that formalising the interaction too much (though it is done in a (mostly) informal way) contributes to the slower creation of social bonds.
Now, what does this actually mean for people who use the internet enough to form social bonds with other users? Firstly I would say that in order for people to create relationships with an equivalent value (or close, or whatever) to those irl people need to be online
a lot. This isn't particularly difficult to do as you can effectively participate from anywhere at any time as I mentioned earlier. Secondly, an internet community will change far slower than a normal one, this is due to the formalised nature of it as well as the elitism that generally prevails amongst many internet communities. Although an argument could be made that as people who "join" are essentially strangers to the rest and this isn't the case in real life then this is unavoidable, or at least more difficult to avoid.
That's probably enough to be getting on with for a decent discussion, but the way that social groups on the internet has fascinated me now for years with a very small amount of material to draw upon if you want to learn (anyone posting cool links to these will get much <3). I'm hoping that some of you can point out some more interesting angles on the problem and make this a decent discussion. I hereby apologise for the sweeping generalisations I have made above, I did try to avoid them, but it was pretty much impossible.
*Naturally, books about the internet become obsolete far faster than books on many other subjects, due to the speed with which it changes and the tendency I have found in them to use out of date "cyberspeak" when perfectly normal terms would have sufficed.
**I'm at work now.
*** U r rite
fake edit: tl;dr
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