online communities - the new black

The modern, digital world we live in allows us to connect and socialise like never before. We have advanced telecommunications systems that allow us to contact each other at any time, virtually anywhere in the world. The internet gives us instant access not only to the people we know, but to everyone, everywhere with a connection. With the ability to connect to others via mobile phones and instant messaging, one would think our need to be socially connected would be more than satisfied. Instead, we have become social networking maniacs.

Telephoning, Emailing, IMing and SMSing is clearly not enough. The phenomenal success of websites such as Facebook and Myspace are certainly testament to our voracious appetite for online communities. It seems we cannot bear to be isolated from each other for even one second of our day. Don’t we all feel naked when we forget our mobile phones and even worse if our internet is down for a period of time? Don’t we feel like we might be missing something?

Is it this feeling of being “out of the loop” if we are not connected to everyone, everywhere, every second, that prompts us to use every piece of technology we possibly can as a social tool? We use our Ipods to podcast, our mobiles to take photographs and connect to the internet, our laptops to organise and manage not only our schedules but now our friendships as well. When we discuss the notion of friendship, can we even class our “friends” on Myspace and Facebook in the same league as our real-world acquaintances? What does this mean for modern relationships? Have online communities redefined the very meaning of “friend”?

While we are procuring, organising, managing and ranking our “friends” through the use of online communities, are we sacrificing the quality of our real-world relationships? Christine Rosen (2007)suspects we are and says we use social networking sites as “convenient surrogates for offline friendship and community”. But what does this say about us? Rosen (2007) believes “it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk—the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.”

So... do we use online communities as social tools in order to enhance our true, real-world relationships or to conveniently avoid them?

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Rosen, C. 2007. Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. The New Atlantis http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/virtual-friendship-and-the-new-narcissism 17 : 15–31. (accessed April 12, 2008).