How "real" is the Internet?

[Typhoid]

I view the internet as a very real social place.
Especially facebook or various forum-sites, as long as you don't go in with the intention of posting as a persona.

I don't understand how people don't view the internet as being "real", especially when it comes to things like facebook. While you may not be directly conversing with your friends, you're still talking to them in a medium - unless everyone you knew over facebook were somehow people you've never met in real life and have no actual connection with at all.

To me, facebook is as real as writing a letter, texting, or talking on the phone.
The reason I can see fights starting over facebook (and having validity) is because if that same thing was said in any other way - the result would probably have been the same.

If someone was to start a fight over facebook by, let's go with saying something like "Hey man, I had sex with your girlfriend" I'd expect the reaction to that to be the same whether you wrote it in a note, in the dust on someones car, or left them a voicemail.


I think the whole "It's just the internet, nobody is themselves" argument/comments should have been thrown out a decade ago. If you just use the internet to pretend to be someone else, or have no actual social investment in what you're doing - why even do it to begin with.

The internet's evolved far beyond something you use to receieve emails from your aunts and uncles on your birthday, and it's more than something to connect and play games with people in Pakistan.

Maybe some people just can't have any type of emotional investment in something if they can't see someone's face, to which phone conversations must be 'so terribly droll.'

I find the internet highly useful. Without facebook I wouldn't be able to converse frequently with my sister who lives in the UK. Without skype I wouldn't be able to talk to my nephews who live with her. And without facebook once again I wouldn't be able to talk to all the friends who've travelled to the other side of the country for school.

[Teuthida]

I was with you KG until I started using the web for my job. Other than here, most other places I'll use my real name and conduct myself as I would in the real world. Have to act professional. I still don't used Facebook and don't converse with anyone online that I knew first in real life. Then again I'm an anti-social misanthrope so there's that.

I do miss the anonymous days. I'll frequently use different names to comment on podcasts but that's about it.