Are Friends Online Friends For All Time?
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Are Friends Online Friends For All Time?
The Internet Has Had A Huge Impact On Our Lives
In fact, that’s almost a trite statement but boy – “the times they are-a changing!”
It’s changed the way we market – of course.
It’s changed the way we shop – it has precipitated the ‘fall’ of the small and big bookstores, newspapers, telephone directories, travel agents (at least to a large extent), even florists are becoming extinct in the traditional sense.
It’s changed the way we get information and the way we learn and the way we communicate and the way we work.
And all of this – in about 15 years, less than 1 generation.
But something else has fundamentally changed – how we form friendships. But are friends online friends for all time?
I think of how I used to form the closest bonds and ties with friends whom I could see on a fairly regular basis. What could be more satisfying that sitting with my close ‘girls’ for a glass of wine or a cup of tea or coffee and having a good ‘download’. We’d save up all our good gossip, all the thins we wanted to unload as you only can with friends and make a night of it.
Or a day of it.
And I still do that and love it, but…..
These days, my good friends are on line. If I’ve actually met them in person, it was probably a fortuitous moment at an event – a few days, and we’re off again to different parts of the country or the world.
But there is no underestimating the bond, or the closeness or the loyalty. I speak to my online friends more frequently now than I do the friends that I cherish whom are local.
And these friendships are not superficial or necessarily opportunistic in nature. They have the same fundamentals.. But what’s amazing is that many of my new friends are people who I wouldn’t necessarily have met in traditional circumstances.
For example, I went to an Empower Network event in July – ‘Don’t Be a Wussy‘. For the first time in my life I shared a hotel room with 2 other women, one whom I knew online and the other was someone I didn’t know, not even online.
10 years ago – I would have never done that – not ever! Well, it didn’t only work out but Laurie Mulcahy Davis has become a good friend, my accountability partner, someone whom I speak with regularly – and not just about work. She’s awesome and we’re close.
We’re very different but those differences are transcended by a natural chemistry, a natural attraction to each other.
And I have a few others with whom I share that kind of friendship and we haven’t haven’t even met in person yet. But our friendship is real, our communication is genuine.
Social media which, a few years ago, ‘I NEVER GOT’, is now basis for almost my entire communication bot socially and for work. I have a few friends with whom I have a more ‘traditional’ relationship but the rest is all online.
So – ain’t that peculiar? I now understand how and why the online dating services work as well.
So are friends online friends for all time – I think that they can be – as much as any friend you meet offline. Some will be some won’t. And that’s how it should be.
The Internet has had a huge impact on our lives – did I say that already?
Any by the way, events like Empower Network events are magical, they are transformational and new friendships is just one part of the magic!
We’re a community of entrepreneurs that support each other, celebrate each others’ successes and offer encouragement when perhaps things didn’t go exactly as planned.
It’s nothing like anything you’ve known, if you’ve only ever had a JOB.