Is virtual friendship more equal than a ‘real’ one?

Many of us must have heard people boasting, “I have 2,500 friends on Facebook. 5,000 people are following me on Twitter.” Are they their real friends? Can people bank on them in need?  Whatever the answers of these questions are, the fact is that the Internet has changed the way we interact with our friends and the way we make friends.

There is a burgeoning interest in cyber friendship these days. People make friends, share sweet-bitter moments with them with ‘likes’ and ‘comments’, and nothing seems impossible that cannot be conducted down the wire. The evolution of social networking websites has allowed users to keep in contact with their loved ones, however far away.

Talking with friends online is convenient. If we want to talk to any of our online friends, we know when to ping them. Their status message on Instant Messenger (IM) tells us whether we can talk to them or not.

“I am in Bhubaneswar but most of my childhood friends are living in metros like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore to pursue higher studies or to work in multinational companies. FB is ubiquitous but a few of my friends are not tech savvy and do not have accounts on Facebook. 

I do talk to them but not as frequently as I talk to those who are in my FB friends list,” said Somesh Dash, a student of Utkal University.  There are many introverts who share happy-sad moments of their life with their friends in the virtual world. 

There are different degrees of friends in real life—some are acquaintances, some are just friends and some others come in the category of Best Friends Forever (BFF). The same degrees exist in the virtual world too but most of us have more acquaintances than friends on social networking sites.

Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, points out in his recent book You are Not a Gadget that this ‘semi-automated self-presentation’ is borne of the binary approach of software engineering, rather than the ambiguities of human interaction. ‘Suggested friends’ and ‘who to follow’ prompts on your Facebook and Twitter account as a result of data filtering.

A year ago Simon Black updated her status: “Took all my pills be dead soon bye bye everyone”. She died after a few hours of updating her FB status. And no one, out of her 1082 friends on Facebook, turned up to help or try to find out what happened to her. However, according to a news report, a few of them lived at a walking distance and could have saved her life.

 Instead of helping, many of them mocked and wrote cruel taunts such as “she does it all the time”, “she is a liar”, “she is not a kid anymore” and other such comments. Conversation with online friends is considered a form of recreation and this incident proves it and indicates that people hardly make friends in the virtual world.

Madhusmita Choudhary said that she has 1,500 friends on Facebook. She invited 150 online friends --with whom she interacted frequently online -- to her wedding but none of them turned up. While, on the contrary, almost all the friends in the ‘real’ world were present at her wedding. 

She said that she was not disappointed because she had not met any of her FB friends in the flesh. She says, “You cannot count on your Facebook friends. Real friendship lies in the real world, not on the Internet.”