Can Online Social Networks Create True Friendship ?


In my experience nothing online (blogs, emails, forum or yahoo groups alike) can really replace the initial face to face meetings that give you clues on rather the new person you have just met will become a true friend or at least share same interests.

Online social networking hasn't really changed my circle of true friends, what it does though with great effectiveness, is maintaining those links that can be reactivated when new opportunities show-up. This is really crucial for people like me, who have been able to maintain friendship over 20 years, moving across three continents, back and forth between Europe, Japan and USA.

True friends don't really mind you don't keep them posted all the time as we are all busy living our own life; although I like to send and receive Xmas card/emails as a minimum effort to make sure friends are happy and not in trouble (that might be due to my "pink side", please see my previous post "Pitch Like A Girl" to find out what it means).

This is very true with my blog too, the majority of people interacting with me, usually by sending a private email, are 99% people I met "physically" before and that I believe share same interests but don't necessarily agree with all I am saying.

I believe some of the common values we share in this virtual community are:

Curiosity
Embracing changes as opportunities
Respect thyself and others
Thinking diversity is good (Life is not a cookie-cutter factory!)

If you think that you don't belong to this community, PLEASE, feel free to send me an email to be removed from my mailing list. As I discovered, recently with someone, not everyone is comfortable to tell you directly they don't want do be part of your social network. You don't have to tell any reason, just ask to be removed by sending an email and put REMOVE in the title.

Anne