Online Relationships

I’ve had the occasional friend in cyberspace. They relationship dynamic is quite a bit different and in my opinion much more difficult to manage. Most of my relationships online were simple friendships with people in online games that we were both playing at the time. The chances that these friendships were strong enough to survive the distance between us, or how different the communication channels can be was very unlikely from my experiences. The difficulty for me is maintaining long distance relationships at all. The online communications tend to be a little bit more difficult to manage also as the tone of a message is often more difficult to convey with the written word alone. The use of emoticons or other visual keys to lend emphasis (e.g. *hints*) to the conversation are very prevalent. I tended to attempt to stay away from acronyms as the meaning can change based upon not only the context of the conversation but also the geographic location, and the society of the participants. For example, some of the acronyms I used were very localized to my society at the time, and while my friends were tolerant of certain misunderstandings, there was the misunderstanding to begin with. The online friendships take a lot more for me to maintain, as I have to spend much more time communicating rather than being in the same physical location. Being in the same space as your friends allows your actions to speak for you. This cannot be achieved with online relationships.