Friendships as close as a keystroke

In this candid interview, Carole shares her own experience with online friendships and makes some insightful comparisons between these and offline ones...

How do online friendships develop?

Shared interests are the main meeting point---usually through messageboards or blog comments. But with the advent of social networking sites like MySpace, with its concept of accumulating lists of "friends", things have changed somewhat.

MySpace is a different animal, because your "friends" list can consist of people with whom you interact online or people you meet on fan pages for music bands, politician pages, and the like. However, MySpace seems to be more about accumulating numbers than real friends.

Can you describe your first online friendship?

I met B. on a movie messageboard in1998 and we started writing some fan fiction together. B. had written some fan fiction before; I had never done any. She is about twenty years younger than me, but we shared a passion for early 20th century social history and embarked on an extensive correspondence with each other and with other aspiring writers as we dug up interesting historical information.

Then B. got married and had two kids, and I went off and did other writing. Our project fell by the wayside. But the experience opened my mind to original characters and plotlines, so that I've had a novel in the works and another one in my head for about six years now, and work on them a bit on rare occasions.

For a while, I had so many online friends of varying degrees of intensity that I spent all my time writing and reading emails! I had online friends through movie sites, about five through fiction writing, and a few who simply READ the fiction and kept in touch. Right now I correspond intermittently with a young grad student in Hong Kong who is enthralled with film and writes his own fan fiction.

What are the characteristics of an online friendship that create bonds between women?

Primarily, they are "drive-thru" friendships because there's often very little, if any, face-to-face interaction; the friendship isn't gauged by the amount of time spent together. While I'm not as regularly in touch with my fiction writing friends as I used to be, I stay in contact with many a few times a year.

Online friendships can be closer in some ways and more trusting than real-world ones. T., for example, was a stay-at-home married mom who during the course of our friendship, came out as a lesbian after a lifetime of trying to be straight, and relied on me to provide emotional support during the coming out process. I think the relative anonymity provided a safety net for her.

How are these different or the same from offline friendships?

Since some online friendships turn into real-world ones, sometimes they don't differ. The biggest difference is in the amount of time required to keep in touch. For those of us who hate talking on the phone (and are fast typists), online friendships can take less time. If I want to stay in touch with an online friend, I just pop off an email. It takes 15 minutes and you don't have to shoot a whole evening or afternoon.

But T's story shows that the relative anonymity behind the wall of cyberspace can create a greater intimacy and willingness to talk about things you might not talk about offline. In fact, sometimes the more you know about someone in virtual life, the more awkward it is to meet in "real life."

Can online friendships substitute for the "real thing"?

Not from the standpoint of when you need a friend to be there for you, because of the time delay of email. And of course they can't help you when you're sick or injured. But for those of us who have had trouble making real-world friends and/or who feel like we don't quite belong, being able to find online friendships, often with people who feel similarly isolated, not only provides a way to find like-minded people, but also builds the kind of social skills that make it easier to extend oneself in real life as well.

Online friendships have opened a lot of doors for me, as well as having made it easier for me to interact with people in general. And having so many interest groups available with just a few keystrokes makes it easy for busy people to get involved with groups and meet people without having to scour their communities.