People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot if idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about every-thing people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind. You can’t kiss anybody and nobody can punch you in the nose, but a lot can happen within those boundaries. (Rheingold, 1993, 5) According to Heinonen offline relationships are evaluated more important than online relation-ships. However, online relationships give support and advice. Like mentioned before, Internet is also a channel to keep up with friends, share ones feelings. It is characteristic for some online re lationships that they are quite short-term compared to relationships outside the Internet. This is explained by the fact that the Internet is a place, where people often look for emotional help, support, or com pany. As people’s lives change, or they may start meaningful relationships in real life, online relationships are often left to the background. (Heinonen 2008, 240) It is also said that people want content and communication in short snack-size bites. (Guber 2007) This new trend toward brevity has implications for the next round of popular social media tools. (Postman 2009) Also the social utilities such as Facebook can often be seen as a means to communicate in short term relationships. For online friends the strength of ties becomes considerably higher when the content of personal communication is high. When it is low, the strength of a
face-to-face tie is higher than for online friends. When the content is average, the strength of the tie does not differ according to the place where the friend was met. (Mesch & Talmud 2006, 38) Many people that socialize online, or belong to the core groups of online com munities, feel that online communities are important. They feel that the room they so cialize in is like a second home. They social ize online every day or even several times a day. According to Heinonen, men of the target group have stronger and closer relationships to their online friends and communi-ties than the women of the target group. Results show that this is, at least partly, due to the fact that men are more active in the activities of online communities and have participated longer than women. Their virtual relation ships may have lasted for years. This means that commitment to the community is very strong, and that they do not want to violate the sense of solidarity within the commu nity. People meet the same people online as they do offline.
Surveys participants feel that they are socially active also outside the Internet. They feel that relationships outside the Internet are more important than online re lationships. However, on-line socializing is a manifestation of the need to have human relationships. These relationships provide help and support, but people are also inter ested in how others are doing. (Heinonen 2008, 240) The Internet has really broken through as forum for socializing and other activi ties.
Heinonen’s study shows that many people, who socialize on the Internet, do not see the virtual space any differently from other socializing forums outside the Internet. (Heinonen 2008, 239) From the beginning the net has been seen as a way to contact friends outside the net. Still, it was seen as something not as good as face to face – contacts. Computers were not used for social purposes at the beginning, but nowadays the ways and technologies have developed.
Still, there are questions concerning technology-oriented communication between people; is it as good as ’real communication’? Can there be real interaction and communication without physical encounter? Can computer-oriented contacts replace face to face –contacts (Collins 2004, 63; Heinonen 2008, 97)
It seems that respondents do not evaluate their virtual friends by their economic standards, societal status and so on. This probably has to do with age of the respondents – they seem to very open-minded and tolerant. 78 percent of respondents do not mind communicating with a person from another social status. It is something that does not really make any difference when communicating online. Usually, this is not an issue in real life either, this more over an issue of personality, rather than issue of technology. But “friendship” in these virtual spaces is thoroughly different from real-world friendship. In its traditional sense, friendship is a relation-ship which, broadly speaking, involves the sharing of mutual interests, reciprocity, trust, and the revelation of intimate details over time and within specific social (and cultural) contexts.
According to Rosen (2207), since friendship depends on mutual revelations that are concealed from the rest of the world, it can only flourish within the boundaries of privacy; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron. The hypertext link called “friendship” on social networking sites is very different: public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized. Friendship on these sites focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you know. Everything about MySpace, for example, is designed to encourage users to gather as many friends as pos-sible, as though friendship were philately. Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that people are incapable of making distinctions between social networking “friends” and friends they see in the flesh. The use of the word “friend” on social networking sites is a dilution and a debase-ment, and surely no one with hundreds of MySpace or Facebook “friends” is so confused as to believe those are all real friendships. The impulse to collect as many “friends” as possible on a MySpace page is not an expression of the human need for companionship, but of a different
need no less profound and pressing: the need for status (Rosen 2007).
Quite a small amount of the respondents consider virtual friends as valuable and real as the
‘normal’ friends. There seems to be some kind of a hierarchy between ‘real’ friends and vir-tual’ friends. If we look back we can see that there has been a tendency to see virtual friends as something that could not be seen as proper and real relationships as friends in face-to-face communication – like mentioned before, spending time on the net has not always been ap-propriate and having net friends has been seen as a nerdy way of life. Nerd term itself carries connotations like anti-sociality, modest looks and overwhelmed passion for computer science, which all position term negative. (Sihvonen 2004, 120) Still, nowadays youth seem to have changed this way of evaluating their friends. There have also been changes in attitudes towards virtual communities, which have mainly been positive. Nowadays the use of networks is natu-ral part of humans’ social field. (Heinonen 2008, 177) This is probably going to be the way of thinking also in the future because more and more of the communication between people is going online. On the Internet the youth are able to create so many different relationships that there really is no need or sense to hierarch friends between real and virtual anymore. Possibly it will become a question of valuating friendships by just how good friends they are, not by the way the friends have become?
There are lots of examples of people who tell the most intimate matters concerning their life to
‘strangers’ they have met online (strangers that have never seen them face-to-face). It is high-lighted that in virtual space it is easier to discuss deeper issues. Heinonen states that one does not have to be afraid of loosing his/her face and can because of this share the most intimate matters freely. (vrt. Saxon & al. 2003) Virtual space also gives an opportunity to leave situation whenever wanted. (Heinonen 2008, 75) Outside the net it is not common to openly share your most intimate feelings, even anonymously, in a public place. (Heinonen 2008, 101) It seems that partial or full anonym ity promotes showing intimate, personal things about one’s true self. It is easy have a hyper-personal relationship in an online community. People tell intimate, deep, and even painful things about themselves fairly early in their online relationships. On the Inter-net people do not have to fear losing face, being ashamed or getting embarrassed. (Heinonen 2008, 236) One reason for this is presumable the fact that it is easier to open up with some one who does not know anything about you and is even living in another city or even in a different country. It is safer than to express your inner feelings and secrets to someone who cannot use them against you while living in a same neighbourhood or city. Without the pressure of knowing some one already, talking can be fast and easy. Transparency of physicality reduces boundaries and inhibitions. (Heinonen 2008, 66)
The net admittedly makes it possible to stay in contact with a wider circle of offline acquaint-ances than might have been possible in the era before Facebook. Friends you haven’t heard from in years, old buddies from elementary school, people you might have fallen out of touch with—it is now easier than ever to reconnect to those people (Rosen 2007).