This morning, as I updated myself on the happenings of my friends via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, one of my friends posed an interesting question…

“My worry about this brave new world of social networking is that it may alienate us from “real life” friends, especially ones not on the grid.  So, great, I feel so connected to people I’ve never met, but what about family and friends I’ve known for years?  Do they get short shrift?”

I actually think the real danger here is something related, but much more basic; the strong sense of familiarity and safety we develop with people we, in fact, do not actually know.  It’s just so easy to share our lives with the world with a few clicks of the mouse and taps at the keyboard.  We post our innermost thoughts once and let everyone read them.  We follow the lives of our friends and acquaintances, and even complete strangers with ease.

In the end, we know a lot more about these people than we ever would have before.  We even know more about our close friends who blog/tweet/broadcast whatever, than we normally would.  It used to be you’d get together with a friend you haven’t seen in months and spend hours just catching up.  Now, you don’t have to bother since you’ve been following their FriendFeed religiously and know every little detail of their lives for the last 6 months.

It became popular with MySpace, but now the social networking scene is crowded with services dedicated to exposing as much of your personal life as possible.

Since everyone on the Internet is more or less the same, we often don’t think twice about posting often too-personal details.  Close real-life friends, and anonymous web surfers all look essentially the same when they leave a comment or reply to a tweet.  And since our interactions with real-life friends are moving online so rapidly, that line gets even more blurred.  When you use the Internet to keep up with all of your real life relationships, the purely online ones can start to seem just as real.

So getting back to my friend’s original question, yes I do think she has a very valid worry.  When it’s easy to keep people updated online, you run the risk of forgetting about the friends and family who aren’t plugged into your every move.  But it goes a step further, when all or most of your relationships move into the virtual sphere, and as the difference between a “real” relationship and a virtual one becomes more blurred, the temptation can be to slide entirely towards the virtual.

Virtual relationships are easier.  It’s easier to find people who feel the way you do, who are interested in the things you are, who lend a sympathetic ear when your real-life buddies might be tired of hearing you whine about the same problem yet again.  It’s harder to burn-out a virtual friend since they can walk away at any point with any number of (valid) excuses.  You can have dozens of virtual friends, whereas you may only be able to maintain a few real relationships at any time in real-life.  The time commitment is less, the emotional investment is less. 

But at the end of the day, you have to remember that with people you know exclusively online, you may not actually know them at all.  The most wonderful thing about the Internet is it allows you to be whatever or whoever you want.  You have the ability to carefully craft how others see you.  You can think more about how you reply to an email than you would if you were talking to someone face-to-face.  The person you deal with online could be completely different from who the person is in reality.  That 30 year old man could be a 14 year old girl (or the other way around).  That caring person who always has a kind word could be a violent drunk.

Or it could simply be that in person they’re supremely annoying.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that all online relationships are fake or exclusively the realm of the socially inept, or even conducted at the expense of real-life ones.  I personally have made many friends through forums, online gaming and blogging.  But I was always acutely aware of the fact that this was all online, and as such a very different animal from the real world.  The problem comes in with those for who can not distinguish the two.  For these people, they run the risk of isolating themselves from people in the physical world around them, and rely on a sense of familiarity that may not be real.

Technology is breaking down communication barriers, encouraging us to share everything about ourselves without much distinction or definition on who we share it with.  But just because you can share intimate details with other people over a computer and an Internet connection doesn’t mean you actually know the person on the other side of the screen.