Online vs. Offline
Posted: Fri 9 January, 2009 Filed under: Domestic, Introspective 1 Comment »Over at the Guardian’s “Comment is Free”, Anna has written a fantastic piece about Virtual people, real friends.
She puts it far far better than I ever could – and it’s well worth reading the entire piece.
“For the first time in history we’re lucky enough to choose friends not by location or luck, but pinpoint perfect friends by rounding up people with amazingly similar interests, matching politics, senses of humour, passionate feelings about the most infinitesimally tiny hobby communities. The friends I have now might be spread wide, geographically, but I’m closer to them than anyone I went to school with, by about a million miles.”
Very well put and true. I wish I had more opportunity to meet blogfriends from all over the world, because I really do count some of them as friends. Bloggers certainly know things about me that none of my ‘real life’ friends do and it cuts out a lot of verbal skirmishing when we meet. I’ve not met a blogging friend whom I haven’t liked a lot, but no social obligations are incurred, which is also good – there seems to be a relaxed okayness about it. For example, if I met a bloke at a party, we liked each other and agreed to meet for a drink, it would ring a lot of alarm bells with my husband and so it arguably should. But I’ve met male bloggers and he hasn’t minded at all, because it’s just turning an online acquaintance into a real one and doesn’t mean more than that.
I have no idea why, but many of the blogs I read from this country are written by men and few of the abroad ones are.