There was a phase, not too long ago, when my husband was hooked on to some chatrooms and had made some new 'online friends'. They discussed books, movies and politics and he seemed to enjoy his interaction with them but I always wondered - Are online friends real friends?
Curious to know what the experience is like I entered an Indian chatroom on Meebo and got talking to a young medical student from Ahmedabad. We exchanged names and some generic details and soon this guy asked me what kind of a chat I wanted. Nervous about what to answer I said a general one. I must admit that my chat with him was extremely boring but what was unnerving was his level of dependance on his chat-mates. No sooner had I chatted him than he gave me his personal email ID and asked for mine. Not too comfortable with sharing my details I politely refused. Soon he got down to begging for it and scared the living daylights out of me. I have not visited Meebo since :)
Some of my husband's colleagues spend their spare moments in office chatting with their online friends. Some have fictitious chat names and a separate account for chatting purposes. I personally get very uncomfortable when I hear of something like this. I guess I am old fashioned in many more ways than I'd like to admit. But I cannot help but wonder - are online friends real friends?
3 comments:
The reason why I'm still not on any of the social networking sites is that I too feel rather uncomfortable about the whole thing. And, I can't even imagine being part of chatrooms! But, I don't suppose that makes me or you old-fashioned. :-) I believe that shyness and introversion is responsible for my feeling uncomfortable and I'm sure you have your own reasons for feeling the same.
I met some of my good friends online. But while reading your post, I realized, most of them were friends of my friends, and then I became friends with them online, and some of them became offline friends too. So I had a certain level of comfort / security already. Then again, I met our common friend from Bangalore through a photography group email chain, and we didn't have any common friends at that time. But we did connect well, and became offline friends too.
So, in a nutshell, the answer to your question is "Yes, online friends can be real friends". But there are enough perverts and psychos lurching around, so it's better to be cautious.
hey i guess there are all kinds of people around the real and virtual world and one has to be cautious. The virtual world however makes it easy for people to fake things!
I have met some interesting folks in both the worlds but would definitely prefer human interaction than being constantly on the chat world :)
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