Dear blogger!

Today we had a conversation at the course I’m attending at Stockholms University called giicod. We talked about the definition of a friend in reality vs a friend in social networking like Facebook, Myspace etc.. We also talked about the posibility, that the way we define friends in social networking will change our world and the way we think of relations in general.

In real life we make a distinction between friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues etc. In social networks there is just one single definition : Friends.

I got this comment from ‘LOmiG’on my first blogpost about virtual relations :

”I think the virtual relation is not a virtual relation : you meet people on blogs that are interested in the same matter than you, and you do just the same as in real life. You exchange thoughts, feelings, and time. To my mind, it’s like beeing in a sport club…without leaving your home.”

I think ‘LomiG’ has a point in his way of seeing virtual relations as a kind of reflection to relations in reality, but I also think there are differences.

I think that the way we meet in our virtual life has other patterns than the way we meet in reality. The impression of a person I meet for the first time in reality would often have more to do with personal appearance and social behaviour and less about the persons thoughts and feelings. A deeper insight of a person would often come in another face of the relation – when you’ve become ’real’ friends. In the virtual reality the relation is build up by another pattern and has other definitions. An example of this can be that if I’m at a concert with f.ex. Tom Waits, I wouldn’t consider him as my friend, but at the same time you can go to my myspace-site and see Tom Waits figure in my topfriend-list. That is because i like Tom Waits’music and use his music as an inspiration to my own music. But does that make Tom Waits my friend?

Another example is the way we relate to eachother on blogs and exchange our thoughts and feelings to anyone who reads the blog. Would we be ready to exchange our thoughts and feelings with a person on the street who accidentally passed by?

A little music pause…………..

I googled on the theme ‘relations on internet’ and found this blog. The writer of the blog is dealing with the same kind of questions and themes like we do at giicod. Among other things she’s writing about a thing called Anti-social networking that is some kind of a reaction to the ‘friendly’ social networking.

In physics and philosophy, a relational theory is a framework to understand reality or a physical system in such a way that the position and other properties of the objects are only meaningful relative to other objects.

Does it work in the same way in the blogospere? Are blogs only meaningful relative to other blogs. When we read someone’s blog, do we relate to the writer of the blog in the same way, than when we read a book or an article in a paper – or is it different?

Now that you’ve read this long post in my blog (if you’ve made it this far!) … in what way do you relate to me? If you should be inspired of my thoughts and even leave a comment, how would you define our relation:

Are we friends? – What do you think??