Oh, and regarding that earlier post...

[conuly]

My lack of real-world friends is because I mostly live online. Youse guys know this. It doesn't disturb me much, but somehow the fact that I have more friends now than I did before (but they're all online) disturbs everybody else in the family VERY much. Messed up.

Comments

[emmyceru.livejournal.com]

heh, my parents are very disturbed by me being on the internet a lot and have more net friends than real friends too. But I don't know... One of my very good friends I met online first at neopets actually... She went to my school and saw my username in the sign in box and decided to neomail me. By coincidence we were in the same statistics class and we ended up becoming really good friends.

but oh well. i've met a lot of people online and then in life afterwards, and even dated a guy i met online (though THAT was a mistake). Whoever said that chatting with people on the net is like pen pals is right, imho. Its a lot like that, cept you can chat in realtime instead of waiting weeks for snail mail.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

heh, my parents are very disturbed by me being on the internet a lot and have more net friends than real friends too.

I think my parents were bothered by it until they actually saw me interacting in person with them. Then they saw that the friendships are genuine and close and how much more easily I interact them than the people I went to school with. And they saw how much happier I was. After that, they stopped bothering at all and they get on very well with my net friends.

This does add further weight to my theory of the two types of friends - situational friends where the bond is that you're in the same place at the same time, or 'proper' friends, where you bond because you have deeper things in common. Online you can seek out these 'proper' friends from a pool of thousands of people, whilst in person you're likely to end up mostly with situational friends.