I was wandering around the contents of my head recently, trying to find some intellectual granite block with which to chip out the shape of another blog post that would be interesting and engaging. It took a little bit longer than expected, but here we are;
Can the internet really provide you with suitable companionship, and how transferrable are the qualities of in-person friendships versus those that you germinate online?
The definition of the question is key here, and some associated reductive thinking to ensure we don’t spin out of control. What do you get from a friendship;
- Advice.
- You are Listened to.
- You are comfortable.
- There is a shared history of experiences to make things relatable.
- You share other friends; you have a group who get on with each other.
- You feel understood.
I am sure there’s a boundless list of other qualities and nuances to the ones I’ve outlined above. One thing I think we all agree on, however, the underlying truth is that friends are out and out great.
Thinking back, some of your best friends are probably from school or university or a job where you worked closely as colleagues. These friends are forged in the periods of your life when you are afforded plenty of time and space together. It seems obvious, but friends develop through proximity and repetition; stronger friendships are developed by the accumulation of time spent together.
The internet is huge, vastly, incomprehensively giant, and growing. How, online, do we replicate this physical proximity? The answer is a reoccurring theme in my posts. Instead of physical proximity, we self-select areas of the internet in which we have an interest or align closely with whom we identify. This proximity is more around your tastes.
Physical friendships challenge and progress us through shared experiences; online experiences tend to re-enforce or solidify our mental shape, like cooking a gingerbread man, we lose our doughiness and become rigid. Online we collect together where we most fit in, a jigsaw of gingerbread moulds waiting for us to point our browser at them.
Balance and pacing turn out to be not just the stuff of good nutrition and health but also our habits and behaviours online as well as offline. Developing into something and aligning ourselves with something, should be considered complementary, not exclusive. Where recommendation algorithms re-enforce (see this blog), so do, typically, online friendships.
Looking back at my badly drawn list of friendship qualities, most of these are easily solved by finding your niche on the internet; you can tick most of them off the list without really much effort or thought because your selection criteria for where you spend your time ensures that you automatically fit. Advice, relatability, comfort, shared group, and being understood. There is little or no work to be done here, no hard yards of experience through failing or controversy. In other words, you are not forced to develop and progress as an individual.
Physical friendships are messy, not least because you cannot “log off” when you don’t feel like it or when you feel messy, annoyed, or just plain sad. Mostly, however, physical friendships lead to unexpected situations, by way of a fairly common example; let’s just go for a quick drink down the pub, and you end up “making shapes” on the dance floor, which later leads to you setting the world to rights whilst your friend stops you from falling over your own two feet in an effort to get you home.
Situationally they create experiences which shape you because you are forced to reveal more of yourself, not through intent, but through the wild ride of being distinctly human.
Friendships in the real world are the bedrock of being the real you. You have to do the work and evolve to situations. You intermingle this with online friends, but before you reach some level of emotional maturity, probably, my advice is that online interactions form the minority of your connectedness. In this way, you don’t stunt your growth.
Online friends are great; we probably all know one or two people reasonably well, despite never having met them on the same square of turf. But they’re the side dish, not the main course.
To round out and try to keep me on the topic of the post, yes, the internet can absolutely deliver friendship and companionship. Still, it’s much harder to create a solid connection based on who we really are, warts and all, and because of this, those friendships will lack some depth. Offline friends can easily transfer online, but offline first friends are much more likely to be hit or miss in person.
As Watson might say to Sherlock Holmes, that’s another case closed. Thank you as always for spending the time on my words; it’s been nice to have you here. Until next time.