Everyone knows there's a stereotype when it comes to online people. Why are these people online? "They must have no social lives." "They're probably trying to be someone they aren't." "Online? Ew! That's where all the paedophiles go!"
1) There is no new race of people specially bred to go online. You aren't meeting a sector of society you couldn't otherwise meet. These are the same people who work at jobs like yours, or who ride public transit with you, or who shop in your grocery store. You'll probably see a different side of them than you would in those interactions, but that doesn't mean they're actually some new organism formed from sludge taken out of our sewers.
2) Yes. There are some people online who pretend to be the opposite gender, or a different age, or just make a different persona. I'm throwing out a big old "so what?" to this one.
Let's say you meet some guy online, and his handle is "SparklyWingnuts" and he says his name's Adam and he goes to school at Carnegie Mellon and is majoring in CompSci. You talk to him for a while, he's got a good sense of humour, he likes a few of the same movies you do, and he loves dogs.
Now let's say that all of that is a lie. What if he secretly hates dogs and his favourite movie is Steel Magnolias? OH NOES! Well, to start with, if he's telling you dog anecdotes and making them up off the seat of his pants, I'm just amused. But anyhow. Let's say instead he's sixty five, is an editor and "his" name is Gladys. Okay, so if you meet "him" you'll be sort of confused and disillusioned.
However? You wouldn't have spent that much time talking to him if "he" didn't actually have the sense of humour and weren't on some level entertaining. You cannot mock up all of your personality and become a different person. You cannot be a dumb person who pretends to be intelligent. You cannot be a dreary person who pretends to be funny. And honestly? Who cares? I don't choose my friends for their age, their gender, their major.... I choose my friends for their minds.
In any case, to be quite honest, most of the people I spend time with online, I speak with on an almost daily basis over the course of months, then, in most cases, years. Keeping up an alias that well over that period of time? I question at that point how much of yourself is not actually reality. We are not some standard person made of some person stuff which determines how we act.
How we act makes up who we are. How we are perceived by others makes up ourselves. We are a collection of realities to start with.
The other issue here is that you can equally well pretend to be someone you're not in person.
Yes, it can be harder, and the age one is more difficult to fake, but that doesn't mean I haven't met liars in person. I was actually close friends with two pathological liars in my time, and while it's no fun, it takes a while to catch on even in person. Deception may be easier online, but it's not isolated there.
3) I am not addressing this. Why? I'm twenty three. While it's creepy, yes, it's just not my concern.
Let's take a parallel one, though. Say I'm afraid someone will stalk me, using the array of information I've made available about myself.
...okay, now let's think about that again. Um. Why? And if people are crazy, I'm probably not meeting many more risky types this way than I am by riding the CTA. Truly. Ask me about the guy with "x-ray vision" and what he thought of my friend's ankles.
I don't make my address and phone number freely available. If you manage to look them up... well, you're talented, for one, as I've recently moved. But so what? Say you ring my doorbell one day.
I get strangers ringing my bell a lot in this city. You don't have any advantage over the rest of the weirdos in this city.
So far as I can tell, that's what everyone else objects to. I'm just not interested in the objections.
Okay, I, like many other internet addicts, did not always have a thriving social life. I didn't really have decent friends who lived near me until high school, though having taken an ed course... we all sat around and talked about middle school and how unutterably awful it was. I get the impression I wasn't alone in that respect. High school, at least, was somewhat better.
Anyhow, by the end of high school I'd gotten an AIM name, and was emailing my sister with some regularity while she was at Williams. I didn't really see the appeal, but then I had no free time senior year due to academics and participating in an outside orchestra.
Then college. Boy, what a wake up call that is. I pretty much believe it's a good thing for everyone to do. You finally get time to be severed from your roots so that you can figure out who you actually are. I had some lonely moments that year, as I was one of a very few frosh in an upperclassman dorm. AIM became the thing I could do in order to talk to my old friends. On my sister's advice I tried some random IRC things, but never really enjoyed that much. I also found (and in some cases re-discovered) any number of comedy sites, which I spent some bit of time looking at. By comparison I had massive amounts of free time freshman year.
Sophomore year I had to spend more time practicing and just generally in classes. I made friends in the school of music because largely we all lived together. Once you've all got to be in the same building together for at least eight hours... we were accused of being insular, but really, who had time to leave and socialise elsewhere? So online whateverness pretty much went on hiatus, which was fine.
Junior year was when things started changing. I did my first practicum in the schools that year, and developed serious doubts about teaching. I had the toughest ed. courses that year, and was done with many of the things I'd most enjoyed about my major, like theory and history.
Predictably enough, by the end of that year I became disillusioned with my major. I spent less time practicing than usual, more time hanging around the dorm, actually having fun. By this time my fixation with my computer was pretty well fostered by my need to seek out new music. Out of boredom one day, I followed a link from brunching.com and discovered the bulletin board associated with that site. Thus began a long and involved relationship.
That was March of 2001. Same month I became a vegetarian, oddly. I spent a lot of time talking online with a few particular people that semester. On the whole I was just overwhelmed with how funny most of my online friends were. And it's incredibly easy to talk with someone for hours when you can multitask at the same time. Also, there's a feeling of comfort inherent in online interaction, I find, which allows you to share all manner of random, and sometimes personal things. I got to know some of these people particularly well, and I'm still in touch with all of them.
Another seductive aspect - I am *horrible* at keeping in touch with people by mail and by phone. Even by email. But instant messaging programs of all flavours are very, very easy to deal with, and I have no obstacles keeping in touch that way. IRC even more so.
The summer following junior year was one of the less pleasant in my life, and I spent most of it in Utah, living with my sister. (Oddly enough, that bit qualified as the *better* part of the summer.) I love my sister, but a) she's only one person, and was literally the only person I knew in the state, and b) she was getting serious in her relationship with Rob (now her husband, who, incidentally, she met online.) This meant I was at loose ends a *lot* when I wasn't working. Work was relatively miserable anyhow. Also, Utah libraries suck.
Toward the end of the last semester I'd rediscovered IRC, but on our private server with people I knew on it. Completely different experience. This set me up for a whole summer of IRC, practicing flute, and learning how to cook beans in new and still not interesting ways.
The people who were IRC regulars became some of my closest friends, as I spoke with them every day, generally for a couple hours before work, and several afterward. We all had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and kept good company for ourselves. I was still lonely, but I felt less isolated. I was still talking to the same person a lot, and his perspective helped me to some extent with my issues with my major.
On the whole, it was a lot easier to settle for online friends than to try to pick through the wads of Mormons, as we lived in Provo County, and the blasted place is upwards of 80% LDS. I'm not very good at befriending people who are religious. Most of my closest friends are atheists or agnostics.
At the end of the summer, I got home a few weeks before school was due to start. I managed to campaign well enough that my father not only a) agreed to drive me to Lake Cayuga to meet my friend Beth there, but b) agreed to swing through Pennsylvania to do it so that we could pick up my friend, Stenny.
At an off ramp for some highway in Pennsylvania I met Stenny and his father (who drove a very, VERY purple truck). He was the first person I'd ever met who I knew from online. Note that I did this with my father, because I am generally a bright girl. We had another few hours of car trip ahead of us, and at first conversation was a bit strained, but I think that could have been just as well because my father was there, and that was slightly awkward. Stenny was the same person in person that he was in real life with the same amusing observations about various things we'd pass as we drove.
When later we got up to Lake Cayuga and met Beth and her family, I still got no surprises, and we had a fun weekend together. From that point on, I had an in. I pretty much managed to expand on people I'd met by meeting people who had met the people I'd already met.
By the time I got back senior year, IRC was an ingrained habit. I slept a lot less than I should have, but I didn't generally skip classes, and life pretty much went on. I was close enough with many of my online friends by this point that every break I got, I managed to go and visit them. I went to Boston more than once, and Colgate more than once, as well.
I always had a lot of fun, though I must admit it really brought home to me exactly what I was missing by having chosen a state school known for music rather than a genuinely academically-oriented college. I still envy my friends their experiences, though I've come to realise I wouldn't give up my own under any circumstances.
In the meantime, Beth also came over and visited me at Fredonia. I gave her a tour of campus at one point... probably the most ambivalent tour you could ever give of a college campus. I did love bits of Fredonia, but utterly despised another goodly portion. At least Beth was amused.
I moved to Washington D.C. that summer, after my sister's wedding out in Utah. After my friend Jenna moved to China to teach ESL, and Lisa pretty much bummed off and spent her whole life with Rob, I had few local friends around, other than those I'd known from online. I spent a good bit of time in the year and a half I lived in DC hopping over to my friend Marie's house. At first her mother referred to me as "your internet friend, Barbara." Eventually I got upgraded.
After odds and ends in DC, causing me to basically force myself out of my apartment due to poor planning, I ended up moving to Chicago and living with someone I met online. Now, we're not shiny, happy roommates holding hands all the time, but it works. Her boyfriend, who she met online, is also a decent type, and they have a good relationship. Most of my friends in this city are people I met online, and all of them are wonderful.
Basically? Most of us are a little quirky. It's true, I admit it. I think I probably spend more time online than I should because socialisation is easier there for me. But the reason isn't because I cannot deal with face to face interaction. Hell, I *prefer* face to face interaction.
The reason is more likely *because* of the aforementioned quirkiness. It's hard to find decent people who are both offbeat and not frightening. If it were easy, they wouldn't be scattershot throughout all of the US and the UK. I'd just have local friends. But I *tried* that sort of thing. Meetup.com? I met some slashdotters... they're just too socially inept. I look for a better grade of dork, and I've managed to find them. Just, whoops, they're all over the damned place.
So, in summary? Stigma of online interaction may be there with reason, and may serve as an important warning, but it doesn't mean that because someone spends time online, they are inherently worthless to associate with. I have derived a lot of good things from the time I've put into it, I've gotten a lot of growth out of it, and I've met a lot of really interesting people and learned a lot of diverse things. Wouldn't trade it for the world.