Create or maintain? Online friendships

More research than you might suspect is done on online friendships. Communicating with others via applications on the Internet has never been such a great part of our lives as it is right now. The question now arises if real friendships can develop from this type of communication.

If you'd ask me, I would say that starting tight online friendships is possible. Though, it seems to be the exception when I look at my own friends and relatives. In deciding whether developing friendships is possible or not, we should know what 'friendship' actually is. For the one person it is of a different intensity than for the other. Personally I have high standards for calling someone a friend, and in this sense, I think it is hardly possible to develop friendships online.

In face-to-face communication there is a certain degree of commitment. It has been proved that about 90 percent of a message is transmitted non-verbal. Physical presence has so many cues and few (internet) applications are able to transfer these cues. There is a theory called the Social Presence Theory (Short, Williams & Christie, 1976), which proves this assumption to be right. "When there are less visual cues, this means less social presence."

Then again, according to me the use of computer mediated communication is good for strengthening and maintaining friendships instead of developing them. So why would the Internet be such a good medium to strenghten friendships? Here the aspect of hyper personal communication (Walther, 1996) does play a role; self disclosure will be way higher on the internet than in real life. Being connected via the internet gives many opportunities to strengthen friendships and to learn more about one another outside the offline environment.

So... what do you think?