To start off, a bit of context about me. I am a nineteen year old male who is very passionate about gaming and content creation. I have a very weird sleep schedule which consists of me going to sleep in the morning and waking up in the afternoon before I have to go to work at my part time job. This results in my online presence and personality being very important to me, as the majority of my friends and also my girlfriend I originally met online and still communicate with online.
To me the formation of online friendships and relationships is no longer a new concept. Previously I would have thought it was kind of weird to have friends that I have never met in person. Although that idea probably stemmed from another common idea shared by the majority of people that questions how well you can truly get to know someone online. Now having met multiple people online and created a lot of very strong friendships I have realised that I can get to know people online almost as well as I can in person. This was proven to me when my online gaming group “Liberty eSports” had a meet up in Sydney. Where we all met for the first time in person, we got along so well and we all felt like we had been friends for a long time. Even though this really was the first time we would meet in person.
Snap-chat as a social media has been a great enabler in allowing friendships like this to take place and be maintained. As we are now able to see pretty much live photos of our friends that we are talking to, allowing us to put faces to the online personas we are getting to know. This creates the sense of trust which is needed in a friendship. “Can we trust the people with whom we form relationships through electronic communities?”(Agnihotri, 2015). This question posed by Agnihotri is very dual sided, as older people of the community still believe that everyone online is a “predator”, where as younger people or people who are more connected with the online world such as myself are realising that online relationships can be amazing and open many doors for people. Personally I would suggest exercising caution when meeting people online, but there are definitely a lot more genuine people wanting to meet others online in recent years, with the advances in social media. Without social media, I would personally have not met the majority of my current friends. This tweet sums up my thoughts on online friendships pretty well.
Imagine a world where we could be close friends with people all over the world without even having to ever meet them in person!! Oh wait……social media makes this possible!!! #Socialmediaage #ALM101— Dechlan McLeod (@dkmcleod99) April 13, 2019
Now let me pose another question, how can someone have/maintain a romantic relationship online? Is it even possible? Well my girlfriend and I met online in a game called Deceit. Firstly we began talking about where we are from and about what games we like etc. As you can probably imagine it progressed from there as we had many common interests and values. Now the interesting thing is that I am from Australia and she is from Austria. With a time difference of 8-10 hours depending on the time of the year its hard to make it work to say the least. As we have access to multiple social medias that we both use, communication isn’t hard. In time we grew closer, wanting to meet in person more and more to know that what we had was real and not just an online fantasy.
Sometimes I can’t believe I am in a relationship with someone who lives over 14,000km away!! Talk about long distance. Thank God for #socialmedia— Dechlan McLeod (@dkmcleod99) April 13, 2019
In January 2019 my family went on a holiday to Europe with one of the destinations being Austria. This was our chance to finally meet each other in person and confirm all of what we believed to be true about the other person. As the time grew closer to when we would meet, our nerves also grew. Anything could have happen, I could have be meeting with a total lunatic. Although these thoughts were eased, as we had seen videos and pictures of each other a lot on snap-chat. Finally though, I saw her, we walked to each other and hugged, in that moment all of the nerves vanished. As we began speaking we both realised that everything was real and just as it was online.
To conclude I believe that online relationships/friendships are not only possible but can be very beneficial to all people. This is because you can be close with all different people worldwide who will influence in a vast amount of ways. Bringing all different cultures, views and values into your life and your worldview!
References
Agnihotri, N. (2015). Investigating relationship between trust and online communication. Indian Journal of Health & Wellbeing, 6(11), pp.1062-1069.
digitalmedia.music.blog 