Internet & IRL Friends
People are the best part of the Internet. What's an Internet Friendship?
A number of my good friends are Internet Friends. I don’t see them in person much, and have never met some of them (yet!), but we keep in touch with texts, emails and occasional calls to each other, alongside shared membership in various online communities.
Internet Friends have never felt too weird to me, but they are completely foreign to some IRL friends, and those friends are completely unexcited by the idea of finding Internet Friends. Why would they need or want them?
With Internet Friends, our interactions are online-first, and an IRL meeting is a rare treat. Rather than our relationship being grounded in a workplace, college, or music scene, our shared identity is online. For me, these friendships often originate on Twitter, but a larger pool of ideas & spaces serves as reference for our conversations. Wonderfully, Internet Friends can continuously introduce you to new online sources - blogs, Youtubers, music, sites… If you want, think of them as an improved algorithm for your feeds. My Internet landscape right now is shaped as much by Internet Friends as it is by my own curation and the algorithms.
Twitter and other platforms sell you a vision of social discussion where anybody can join in: Elon replies to anons with 200 followers. Massive brands can retweet your meme. People you respect get into debates about issues you care about, and you can contribute your thoughts right there too! Discussing the things you see on your screen with people who also care about it makes internet life more fun, but beware! The best discussions are probably being had in private, between individuals and in group chats - between Internet Friends.
It’s more difficult to introduce IRL and Internet Friends to each other, which can create an uncomfortable distance between different groups of people, both of which might be important to you. IRL friends and Internet Friends are missing shared context. IRL Friends who are not engaged with online communities are unlikely to understand them, or to encounter it at all, and vice versa. For people you know IRL, you can bring them together at a party or group activity. They won’t always mix, but it’s much harder to do the same for people from IRL and the Internet. Your IRL & Internet Friends might get along well, but they probably won’t get a chance to encounter each other, except through your descriptions of one to another - or a well-timed Facetime.
Spending time with somebody IRL who shares your Internet spaces is magnificent. There’s something special about it. The Internet represents a major part of my intellectual and emotional interests and is where I engage with many of the ideas that interest me most. It works, in part, because it’s geographically unbound. But who do you talk to IRL about the ideas you spend so much time reading about online?! If you can get this right, life is better. <Move to NYC or SF>
Internet Friends are not people you have a one-off interaction with online and never cross paths with again. There needs to be some continued communication between both, and there’s a certain art to getting into a good flow with Internet friends. I think these 1:1 conversations are best done with continuous back-and-forth over longer periods of time, as opposed to discrete conversations that begin and end over the course of a couple of texts. My favourite chats are the ones where the frequency of texting is high variance, and there is no expectation for very prompt replies, or to check in with a formalish “hi, hope you’re well” with each text. Instead, they are fluid exchanges of links, thoughts, reactions and pictures. (it’s a shared feed) Best if they are not limited solely to the original, shared idea that caused you to meet that person online.
Unexpectedly, texting works fine for Internet Friendship, you don’t need to call that often.
Nadia Asparouhova’s essay provided some inspiration for this piece.