When I sent him a link to my gig review the following day, he sounded confused: “I didn’t even know you were there…” So maybe I should have interrupted those conversations somehow and introduced myself. In the run-up the gig he spent the entire time in various conversations, and after the last chord had been struck I had to dash to catch my train home. On the way to the venue, I remember thinking to myself: “Should I introduce myself? Should I say ‘hey, I’m from Twitter…’ Would that be an imposition? A breach of social media etiquette?” I genuinely didn’t know and arrived at the gig without having made a decision. We had exchanged a few tweets and he encouraged me attend a gig on a tour he was conducting for the album he released over the summer. I wrote about this one occasion here: it was a small gig by an indie musician I had been following on Twitter for a couple of years. And I “met” them only in the loosest sense of the term. I have been on Twitter for more than ten years now (a fact which still sometimes catches me by surprise), and in all the time I have only met someone I knew solely from Twitter once: there’s no particular reason for that – it’s just the way things worked out. Maybe we’re all pretty chill now about talking to strangers online. Maybe Twitter – and social media in general – still felt like a novelty back then and people felt more of a need than they do now to anchor it in the real world. Nowadays they are barely mentioned and once or twice I have wondered why. These were real world get-togethers of Twitter friends. Perhaps the only parallel to these relationships from the pre-internet era is the pen pal: but these were obviously much slower, more formal affairs, lacking the spontaneity we now take for granted.Ī few years ago, so-called ‘tweet-ups’ were fashionable. You probably wouldn’t know the same things about them. So even if you knew your internet friends in real life, it might not be the same kind of relationship. People respond to this freedom in different ways – some, unfortunately, by transforming into trolls. We are no longer looking people in the eye and so the concerns that affect our real world behaviour fade into the background. We curate our personalities, and festoon the internet with this, bypassing all the interference of the real world. Online we reveal things we might not otherwise reveal, express thoughts we might otherwise keep to ourselves. the relationships we form with people online are different to those we form with people in real life. A person’s voice is quite a personal characteristic and it can certainly tell you something about them: but how much does that mean without seeing their face as well? Gamers may not know what their MMOG pals look like, but thanks to voice chat, will known what they sound like. Even if they have posted photos of themselves, these may only give a very approximate sense of what someone looks like when they are standing in front of you (as anyone who has ever used a dating app or website can confirm!). We may not even know what our online friends look like. It’s certainly true that online friendships lack what seem to be a central element of the real life counterpart: the physical presence of the other person. Connections are forged and relationships form.īut such people friends in the real sense of that word? My own answer would be … maybe. They learn things about each other’s lives, views, and personalities. These allow people who may never have met in the real world to interact freely and get to know each other, sometimes to a remarkable degree. Here’s an interesting question for you: can you be friends with someone you’ve never met? A few decades ago that would have seemed like a nonsensical question, but nowadays I think a surprising number of us would answer ‘yes, you most certainly can’.Īnd what has enabled this curious twist in human relations is the internet: specifically social media and other interactive systems like online gaming.
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