By Katherine Burgess
Managing Editor
About five years ago, four friends — one who lived in California, one in New York State, one in Japan and one in China — met up with me to spend a sunny San Diego day exploring a lighthouse, play games in a park and chatter away.
When our weekend together was over, we gave each other hugs and parted sadly, knowing we would miss each other as we returned to our homes.
One thing made this gathering a bit more unusual than an ordinary reunion of friends. None of us had met in person prior to that day.
The five of us had, however, known each other for several years, meeting in online classrooms and carrying on our friendships through email, social media and the occasional Skype call. We had met at an online school and continued our friendships even after the classes were over.
Those four friends made up some of the deepest friendships I had through junior high and high school. The fact that those friendships were online, with only rare in-person meetings, did not make them any less meaningful.
Today I often hear people talking negatively about online friendships and relationships. Maintaining a friendship through the Internet gives people opportunity to lie and mask their identities in a way they cannot do in person.
Only two issues ago I wrote about Manti Te’o, a Notre Dame linebacker who was hoodwinked into thinking he was in a relationship with a nonexistent person.
But I have had none of these negative experiences, despite my abundance of online friendships. While caution is important, we should not avoid online friendships just because the Internet has sometimes been abused.
The subject of online friendships also has been discussed at Union in recent weeks. On March 1, Union hosted a panel on “Technology and the Soul” during chapel hour.
Ashley Blair, assistant professor of communication arts and one of the speakers that hour, likened online friendships to the pen pals who corresponded with our parents and grandparents.
The question of online friendships, she said, is not a new question but an old one that harkens back to those long-distance friendships conducted through handwritten letters.
When I consider the hours spent emailing and calling my “online” friends to tell them about my day or the things I had been musing over, I consider those relationships to be just as legitimate as any other.
We called each other for help with homework. We threw birthday “parties” for each other, using Facebook or whatever other creative means we could contrive.
We mailed each other Christmas cards. We had copious inside jokes. We even made T-shirts based on our inside jokes.
And, when we could, we did our best to meet up in person, even if it meant flying a few countries or states away. Our friendships were clearly authentic. We could see that by the amount of conversation and fun we had when we met in person.
So online relationships have their limits — they truly do. There are ways in which they pale in comparison to seeing a friend in flesh-and-blood. But that does not, for one moment, mean that online friends are necessarily “lesser” friends.
Katherine Burgess is a sophomore journalism major.
