Week 14 - Cyberspace Friendships

I think to some extent everyone, at least in college, has cyberspace friendships whether they be a lot or a little. Social networking websites are making such a big boom and they are only getting bigger. Websites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter allow people to connect or reconnect with each other without having to meet face to face. I personally have multiple friends that I only seem to talk to through Facebook. Just about all of those friends on Facebook are people I have met before in person but either rarely see them face to face or never have seen them face to face since I met them. Since I am friends with them on Facebook, I am able to talk to them and see what they are doing and our friendship never goes beyond Facebook. So I do technically have friends that are exclusively on cyberspace.

I would say that the differences between the face to face relationship versus the cyberspace relationship can be both a good and bad thing. The good is that it allows people the capability to connect with others without having to spend the time and money meeting up with them. Sometimes in a friendship all there is to talk about is what is new in their lives and how things are and meeting up is not necessarily needed. The bad thing about cyberspace is that it takes away from the intimate emotions that come as an attachment to the friendship. If two lonely people only talk to each other online and never meet, it is possible that a great friendship, or more, is being sacrificed. Cyberspace becomes this barrier between people and friendships, although could be massive in numbers, lacks intimacy.