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Week 3 - Online Friendships

How have the impacts of online communication affected your interpersonal relationship?

I have had a lot of friendships over the years, but there's this one online friend group that I have had for many years and will forever appreciate them as much as I could. This friend group would have not existed if it weren't for this one friend for creating a discord server (think of it like a group chat) with the few of us. Online friendships can be just as important and fun as in person friendships are. Online friendships can be just as meaningful and enjoyable as in-person ones, and they also follow the stages of Knapp's relationship model.

The first stage of Knapp's relationship model is Initiating. This happened when we first met in a separate server. I remember when it just started out as simple greetings, "hello." It then switched to the Experimenting stage. We would talk about Minecraft, BTS, our school experiences, and more. It went from small hello's to small conversations and then we ended up having conversations that lasted for hours. While all the stages of the "coming together" side of the model are important, the Experimenting stage is the most significant to me. It is important to me to know that I can get comfortable with you and that we can talk for a long time. Fortunately, he and I managed to get past this stage, which led me to being invited to the other server. Our relationship did continue with following the other stages of Knapp's Relationship Model.

The other server quickly became one of my favorite online spaces. Despite being from different states, we’ve managed to build strong connections over the years. We’ve supported each other through tough times, created many good memories, inside jokes, and continuously found common interests. It reminded me of the sentence, "Because our perceptions are egocentric, we choose to interact with people who are similar, in some dimension, to ourselves. 1n other words, our friends tend to represent some part of ourselves." (Pearson et al., 2021) I do think this is very accurate to our friend group. We were connected through discord, but we were actually all connected by a common interest, which was BTS at the time. It did end up branching out into many other similar interests, but that was the main one. I would have said we were connected by our LGBTQ+ identities, but one of them is actually cisgender and heterosexual. 

Going back to the question, "How have the impacts of online communication affected your interpersonal relationship?" I would say it has impacted me crucially and positive in many ways. While some may view online friendships as odd or less significant, they are important to me, especially with this group. I have learned many things from them. I have found myself to be comfortable with talking to them in voice chats, which is something I always struggle to do in online spaces. My anxiety takes over and I can never find myself to enjoy it, however with them? I am so glad they understand what I go through and that they make sure

I am comfortable. I would have never thought that my first ever message in that server, a simple "yes," would lead to us becoming so close that we now consider each other family. One of these days we do hope to save up money and meet up to have a sleepover.

All of us in a voice chat together.
References:

Pearson, J. C., Nelson, P. E. (Paul E., Titsworth, S., & Hosek, A. M. (Eds.). (2021). Human communication (Seventh edition.). McGraw-Hill Education.

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