Sakuyae said: The two are obviously very different, but I feel like sometimes online friendship can be stronger than IRL friendship. F.e.: A guy/girl you talk with online and play games all day is better than an IRL friend you only talk to every 2 week for 10 minutes.
But it goes the other way around too. Most of the time IRL friendship is stronger.
The one thing that makes me value online friendship so much is that you can become friends with people living in distant countries, and you'd probably never meet them without the internet. It also helps to make you more open-minded, since you get to know people from different cultures.
IRL friendship's advantage is that you can actually see if the person you are talking to is listening to you, while on the internet you can't be sure if the person on the other side is even paying attention. And IRL expression is true and real, while an internet emoticon is over-exaggerated.
I agree, but the thing is, and hate to admit it, online friends stay on a very superficial level. You can't really experience something that isn't confined on a virtual setting. That is very lacking! Be it on aforum, a game or whatever, real friendship needs human contact, it grows out of irl situations, hardships or everyday life which simply are missing in a virtual place. You are not able to see how they are, or behave, in those situations. I have trouble explaining it
I have a lot of experience with online friends. I was head of a RTS game clan, being able to meet really awesome people I really get along with. I considered them my little brothers and spent an insane amount of time with them not just playing, but talking, discussin, so much that we really exceeded the plain "game relantionship". After a 4 years of that we stopped playing but we made a group on facebook where we can keep in touch. I met some of them irl too.
Same goes for forums. I met a few guys like 10 years ago and since then we always jumped from forum to forum together. I consider them more valuable to me than most of my closest irl friends because we simply shared so much. Thanks to them I was able to see the world from a totally different angle, learn a lot of different things.. |