“What an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago?”

I’d pay (a small sum) to listen to a conversation between you and him about identity ownership and social software.

Many of my online friendships have moved offline when they have been with people who live in this country. While this has also applied to international friendships in some cases, that does not mean that those that have not been consumated face to face are any less strong.

Digital communication has enhanced and crucially speeded up the non face to face contact. Pre digital “pen-friends” were far more tenuous and less enduring than their digital equivalents.

However, it’s not just time constraints, it’s also a matter of cognitive limits; if you have 300+ “online friends” (or “buddies”), can you really relate to each and every one of them like you do with, say, your fellow students, colleagues, neighbors, and real-world friends? (Recalling a conversation by looking up a chat log doesn’t count… )
I think what’s usually missing in the online world are actual shared experiences – be it a school trip, a business project, a party, or simply casual encounters on the garden fence. This usually helps establish a unique identity for the respective person in the mind. (Collaborating online – e.g. on an open-source project coordinated via mailing lists – can provide some of those aspects, but not the whole range.)

Of course there’s also convergence (e.g. people meeting in real life eventually), so it’s not a black-and-white issue. Also, modern facilities like e-mail, IM, Facebook or Twitter definitely do make it easier to keep in touch. But they cannot overcome our inherent cognitive limits.

Just my two cents…

I’m curious to know, JP, how you measured your Digital Dunbar number. I think my current number is around 150, funnily enough, but its still going up!

I’m not sure I agree with Nate – if we consider the people who are both in our online and offline groups, I think the online relationship nourishes the offline relationship. Perhaps the added depth to these relationships offsets those with less depth. I like to think so!

I also read more from people than they would tell me usually over time, the conversation gets faster.

I have one close ‘offline’ friend though we found us online as kind of soulmates. It is hard to keep the relationship up as we live in different city, short phone calls etc. The work to be invested in that is much higher than I have with others. I do not get to know every bits and such, but I do get more than just something on the surface.

I see how they interact, what they care about etc. There are friends from the job I left, they do not life in the net world. It is much much MUCH more work to even get the updates / conversations I take part in from my online friends. So yes, the time in the day is limited. But the way one can use it is much more elegant and efficient.

Yes I dare to say efficient about something like friendship. You can call it differently and hide this ugly term, but it is about that. For me it is not that the time with friends has decreased, but it is a rise in time spent with people who could become friends as we get to know each other.

But I like to say one point: There are a lot of people out there who can’t take this kind of interaction, who hate it. Who consider “real life” to be the only thing which counts.

That is fine! But for them, not for me. I recently go through my nearly 700 xing contacts. Around 75% of them are people I have a more or less deep connection with. I would not call that friendship.

But just because this is not my closest friend since childhood does not mean this connection is worth nothing.

It is worth a lot.