Sunday, October 3, 2010

To friend or not to friend. That is the question


Friends, they are our partners in crime, the people whom we love, support and laugh with. Friends pick you up on a bad day and lend a hand when you need one. Friends are the people we confide in, they lend a shoulder to cry on or offer an ear to listen to your problems. Friends are people who share our likes and interests, offer companionship and are people who we enjoy being around. They are the people we have grown up with, people who we have met from sport teams, schools and youth groups. Traditionally we would interact and communicate with our friends by seeing each other face to face, talking on the phone, writing letters, Christmas and birthday cards.

However, something that really interests me is the idea of online friendships and whether the dynamic of friendship has changed since the invention of the internet. If you think about it, social network sites like facebook allow its users to combine all of their networks and converge them into one space. Take my own page for example; I have 394 friends who include work mates, family and friends from the various schools I attended as well as friends who I have met online. Social network sites make it easy and effortless for individuals to keep in touch. By the click of a mouse I can see how my cousin in Russia is doing by looking at her status updates, or by viewing her pictures. I can send emails, virtual gifts and cards over the internet much like I would in times when these technologies were not available. I can instant-message and Skype my friends, talking to them in real time and be kept in the loop of what goes on in their daily lives.

The internet even allows me the opportunity to meet and become acquainted with people online whom I would otherwise not have the chance to meet outside of the cyberspace world. Can these people then too be classed as friends? Social network sites in general seem to encourage this kind of behaviour amongst its users. I would consider some people whom I have met through various blogs, websites and social network sites to be my friends as I am sure many other people have too.

What do you think? Has the idea of friendship and those who we regard as friends really changed all that much with the invention of the internet? If you think about it, we still do many of the same things to keep in contact with friends that we have always done, except now it is done online. Emails have replaced hand written litters as skyping and text messaging has replaced phone calls. In essence, it is very much the same. On the other hand, many of us today also have friends and contacts from places all around the world whom we have never actually met face to face but talk to regular basis. In this instance the concept of a friendship has changed dramatically as it challenges traditional notions of friendship. Is it the same or different? Looks like friendship is changing with technology too, do you agree?

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