Online Relationships

Recently, I've been thinking about a friend who was deciding to join an online dating site based upon the success of another friend. I couldn't fathom this working for me, not on a romantic level, but a relationship one - I couldn't see myself even doing this for a platonic online interaction. I think there's a couple of reasons why.

The internet can be a very compartmentalized place - I'm interested in cooking, so I'll visit the food blogs, and I'm interested in tech, so I'll visit some tech forums, but I don't go to the cooking blogs and comment on technology, because people are probably not interested in that, and I won't be able to obtain the discussions I'm looking for. I sort of extrapolate that to my entire online presence - I purposefully accentuate the aspects of my personality that I want to represent me - things like my hobbies and my writing - and downplay or outright hide other aspects - like my employment. These practices are grounded from my older experiences with the anonymous internet, but with the popularity of the social web, more and more people who wouldn't necessarily take an active participation online (like my parents) are getting into the game (like Facebook), and I don't think it occurs to them to represent themselves in any manner other than who they really are. I've even been wary of friending people I've met in real life on Facebook before getting a chance to know them, because of the incongruity between my largely-established online persona, and my slow-developing physical relationship.

I'm an active participant in Yelp, and I enjoy writing my reviews. Once you become one of the site's more active participants in the community, you gain an "elite" status, and in larger cities, Yelp sponsors parties featuring free food, drink, and gifts, called Elite Events, where you have the chance to meet with all of your online friends. Luckily, I moved from San Antonio before we started doing these things, because I would have avoided them as much as possible - I have maybe one common interest with these people, and I'm going to try and carry a conversation with them? It's way too much work, and honestly, I didn't like them enough to consider a relationship outside of my established environment to be anything worthwhile.

The other pitfall of communication online is sharing too much. I had a dear friend which the closest aspects of our relationship were cultivated in the tubes due to there being less of a risk to typing secret or embarrassing things online rather than saying it to their face. At first, it was great - I was telling her things I've never told anyone before or since, and it strengthened the bond between us knowing that I could trust her with these things . It became a crutch, though - and I fell susceptible to oversharing - not the kind of oversharing you may see in status messages in Facebook or Twitter (whatever your stupid kid is doing) (the sandwich you ate for lunch), but abusing the emotional aspect of the relationship as a means for attention or establishing dialog. It eventually corrupted the friendship, and since then I've been very reserved about sharing or complaining too much online, largely because I've realized that no one cares about my feelings. I don't say this in a self-deprecating way, mind you - it's just at best boring and at worst absolutely annoying to have someone whine all the time, and it doesn't really foster any relationships. Today, I realize that sharing content is a much better way to create these relationships, though it takes more effort than being an attention whore. Moving from an emotional-based perspective to a content-based one is more useful to the internet as a whole.

Many people alter their real world personalities depending on with whom they're interacting, even varying from friend to friend, so it would make sense that their online persona would again contained altered behavior that they wouldn't normally share in reality, keeping everyone in their separate little areas - this is how I act with my work friends, this is how I act with my family friends, etc. - and then there are those that are more of one note and try and rectify all of their little worlds together. For those people, breaking the virtual wall with new people online is an easy thing. For people like me, not so much. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but more importantly I think it's interesting to consider the dynamic between those who choose to go online to escape from themselves and those who use it as a way to cultivate what they already have. If it is a generational occurrence, or the result of more non-technical users participating, it will be interesting to see how we represent ourselves ten years from now when an online presence is a necessary part of society.