Gestern erreichte mich dann die Mail einer lettischen Forscherin, die danach fragte, ob ich die Hypothese, dass es keine echten Gemeinschaften, die nur über das Netz organisiert sind, gibt, immer noch aufrecht erhalten würde, und ob ich weitere Argumente dafür oder dagegen gefunden hätte.
Ich denke, meine These stimmt immer noch, und glaube, dass meine Gründe dafür auch Sie interessieren könnten. Deshalb veröffentliche ich hiermit die Antwort auf diese Mail. Schade nur, dass das Kommentarsystem immer noch nicht funktioniert, Ihre Meinung hätte mich sehr interessiert. Mailen Sie sie mir doch.
Selbst etwas bizarre Freunde treffen sich besser in real life ...
„Dear XXX,
thank you very much for your mail and the interest in my old article. I will gladly give you an answer to your question.
But first let me point out that I dropped out of active research in things online by the turn of the century. Nowadays I work mostly in ethics and in literary sciences. So don´t expect a good knowledge of recent research literature.
But I am very much living with and in social networks as Facebook, Xing and so on, so I do have a good practical knowledge. And from this viewpoint, I think that my thesis from 13 years ago still holds true in essence. There are no virtual communities which do have the same quality with regard to parameters like trust, friendship and tolerance with those in real life.
Back then I certainly underestimated the role the Internet would play in every people´s life by the end of the first decennial of the new millennium. But as for my thesis this very important role of the Net is quite interesting, since nowadays there are millions of people which have connections via net in two ways. First there are the connections with people with which they are acquainted, even befriended in real life, and second there are the people you only know by wire. The latter may be blokes with which you are playing online games or customers and employees which with you commute. And I still guess that a close relationship is almost always - mind, there might be exceptions, but I guess they are seldom - possible only with people you have got to know in RL.
The Net is very well adapted to keep your personal network close together. Especially those seemingly meaningless textbits which you post on Twitter and Facebook often are very meaningful to people which know you. So you keep everyone important in your life informed about your general status. (Though there are people saying that most postings are strategically and do not tell what really is going on in the psyche of the poster - but that does not conform with my observations.) But my guess is, that the meaning of your tidbits of information are meaningful only to people you know from RL, and also that these tidbits do interest only the people you know from RL, but not the occasional gaming-partner or customer.
There lies a whole world of meaning behind a Tweet like - let me pick one randomly from my current Tweetdeck-screen - this: "mmmmm Hubby's going to surprise us with cinnamon rolls (even a sugar-free one for me, lol) He spoils us :-P". What do you make of it without knowing this guy? And wouldn´t you smile to your self and have a good feeling about your friend if you knew her, and see that she obviously expects a good afternoon? There is very much meaning in this white noise of the Net, but only if you care, and you cannot really care for the 501 anonymous members of your gang in Mafia Wars or the totally virtual neighbours in Farmville.
I basically did not come up with additional arguments, but with additional observation, though only on a strictly subjective and personal scale. If anyone would want to test my old hypotheses, now would be the time and I would advise to inquire into the two different groups of online-acquaintances as a measure for testing and observation.
Hope that helped, good luck with your work.
All the best,
Frank“
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