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I see this a lot, but is it actually true? Friendships are built on a shared interest / shared activities, and frequent contact. When you stop using the commu

I see this a lot, but is it actually true? Friendships are built on a shared interest / shared activities, and frequent contact. When you stop using the communication medium your friends use, then you just added friction to reach you, which stops frequent contact. you slowly go from a friend to an old friend or a distant old friend. There is a reason that when you move, its a lot harder to keep up with your old neighbors.

izzydata 4y ago
I think it is more implying that friends that you have exclusively online are more of psuedo-friends than real friends. Especially if they make no effort to continue communication after you stop using whatever form of social media you were using before.
nonameiguess 4y ago
There's a difference between a real friend and someone you have some affinity with and currently happen to share a community of some sort. It's fairly common to meet a friend while attending a particular elementary school, going to a church, playing a sport, but when you finish school, stop going to that church, stop playing the sport, you remain friends. It's obviously common to lose touch with a bunch of people and never talk to them again, either. Those were not your true friends. Which raises an interesting question. Is it possible at all to have a relationship that purely takes place on a web platform that will continue after you leave the platform? "The" communication medium your friends use seemingly shouldn't matter. A person you only interact with when there is no friction involved isn't much of a friend.
- clnq 4y ago
  Jack Shafer in their book "The Like Switch" says that there are 4 elements in building a friendship: proximity, intensity, frequency and duration of interaction. Similarly to work and school friends who are very proximal and spend a bit of time with us, online friends tend to be very distant physically but the interactions we have with them can be intense (like gaming) and frequent. So these pseudo-friendships can have some elements of a strong (substitute for the word "real") friendships, but don't have all of them.

izzydata 4y ago

I think it is more implying that friends that you have exclusively online are more of psuedo-friends than real friends. Especially if they make no effort to continue communication after you stop using whatever form of social media you were using before.

nonameiguess 4y ago

There's a difference between a real friend and someone you have some affinity with and currently happen to share a community of some sort. It's fairly common to meet a friend while attending a particular elementary school, going to a church, playing a sport, but when you finish school, stop going to that church, stop playing the sport, you remain friends. It's obviously common to lose touch with a bunch of people and never talk to them again, either. Those were not your true friends. Which raises an interesting question. Is it possible at all to have a relationship that purely takes place on a web platform that will continue after you leave the platform? "The" communication medium your friends use seemingly shouldn't matter. A person you only interact with when there is no friction involved isn't much of a friend.

clnq 4y ago
Jack Shafer in their book "The Like Switch" says that there are 4 elements in building a friendship: proximity, intensity, frequency and duration of interaction. Similarly to work and school friends who are very proximal and spend a bit of time with us, online friends tend to be very distant physically but the interactions we have with them can be intense (like gaming) and frequent. So these pseudo-friendships can have some elements of a strong (substitute for the word "real") friendships, but don't have all of them.