A topic that never seems to go away -- and probably for fairly obvious reasons somewhere like here -- is the online/offline life divide. There's so many questions, like can you ever truly know someone on the internet alone? Are the friends we have online really "friends"? And just how separate should we keep the two worlds.
I have a fairly laid-back approach to it all. When it comes to friends online, my simple rule is that when it comes to blogger/facebook/myspaz/IM I won't be friends with anyone I wouldn't be prepared to be friends with "in real life". That is, I don't befriend just anyone I went to school with for the sake of it -- just knowing someone isn't enough. I don't "befriend" my friends partners or exes, unless I feel I know them in their own right. It always bemuses me when I see friends of mine befriend my exes on Facebook.
Wherever I can, though, I try to make "online" friends into "real life" friends. To me, it's all different layers of knowing someone -- and you can know someone online, but to really be friends I like to spend time with them in person. I can't think offhand of any occasions when I've regretted it. I like it when I talk to someone on the phone for the first time, and after that when I read their words I can hear their tone of voice, as if it was being read aloud.
But on the other hand, for good reasons of their own plenty of people like to keep a very strict wall between online and offline. Maybe they've been stalked before, or let down. Maybe they feel they already have enough friends in 'real life'. Maybe they are more open and honest online and wouldn't feel comfortable meeting people who know such things about them. I can identify, naturally I'm more open about things on here than I am in person -- I write about things here that some of my closest friends don't know about. But at the same time, I've nothing against meeting people who know these things.
But what about the other side of it, there's got to be plenty of people who consider the internet as shallow and meaningless? Who of my select group of readers gives no thought to the people they know online, let alone consider them to be real friends? Who would politely decline an opportunity to meet a fellow blogger?
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm naive to think that the people I know online can be considered to be real friends -- although I think I know more people through the internet that I could call any time of the night if I was crying out for help, than I do in my "real life". But perhaps some of you are sitting there, and shaking your head at how pathetic it seems -- and thinking how wrong I am.
I think an important factor to me is I don't consider time spent online to be any less "real life". It might be different if I spent all my time playing a character in an MMORPG, or keeping up the pretence of a fictional blog persona -- but although you might see different sides, or fewer layers, it's not any less real.
Either way, I continue to welcome chances and opportunities to meet up with people I know online -- I have stayed with, lived with and even dated people I've met online. And I look forward to meeting even more.
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