Relationships and Media

Can we live in Cybercity?

Creating new friendships, or maintaining friendship online, have become daily activities for most individuals. Friends and family are now able to log onto chat rooms, post blogs, or instant message each other. Distance no longer extinguishes friendships, since friends are now able to communicate in the virtual world. New cybercities exist where friends can come together and communicate with one another without having to be in the same place at the same time, “Cybercity is a virtual community on the Internet, a social world that is no less real for being supported by Internet technologies, with residents drawn from countries all over the world” (Carter, 2006). Although the cybercities are great for locating or maintaining new friendships, finding trust in people can be hard when people are not able to communicate face-to-face. In face-to-face communication, people are able to distinguish fact from fiction through facial expression, body movements, eye contact, and speech frequency. All of these indicators are eliminated when communicating online, so how do people determine what friendships are are honest and real? A good way to indicate that people will be more open and honest is to determine how frequent each friend visits the same chat rooms (Carter, 2006). People tend to be more honest when they are sending the same messages to the same online chat rooms. Honesty is only one conflict when is comes to friendships on cyberspace. Another conflict, that is extremely important when maintaining or creating friendships, is intimacy. Due to the lack of trust, people need to be anonymous when visiting the chat rooms, because there is always a chance that their identity could be taken from them. Intimacy is an essential part of friendship, so how can there really be a friendship without it being intimate? And once the online friends meet outside of the Cybercity, how well are they going to be able to communicate face-to-face with one another. There are many factors as to why online friendships are not able to be as close as friendships in real life, but the Internet has made friendships more accessible and easier to maintain.

Carter, Denise. Living in Virtual Communities: An Ethnography of Human Relationships in Cyberspace. Information, Communication & Society, Volume 8, 148-167.

Here is an article on online friendships:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20020504/bob9.asp

posted by Kayla Bratton @ 6:19 PM