So I met this guy...on Facebook...

A number of social network founders have stated that the purpose of their sites is to not only maintain relationships, but to create and develop them as well. Today, there is a website and a social network for everything under the sun. Blogs and other online communities allow people of obscure and niche interests and hobbies to connect. But in terms of making relationships, is the internet really as magical as many make it out to be?

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is one of the aforementioned founders that stated their networks allow others to form new connections. My personal opinion on this topic falls into an area most internet-related opinions fall into—the gray area. In an open forum such as Facebook, establishing new relationships are next to impossible. I only have one friend on Facebook that I have never met in real life and she’s an author I met on a group discussion board a few years back…and wait…now I have no friends I’ve never met. Problem solved. On a site with a broad bonding agent—friends, music, television, etc.—I wouldn’t want to be friends with people I don’t know personally. I’ve heard stories of people meeting on large social networking sites and in the early days, of MySpace and whatnot, it was a legitimate concern of parents to be worried about their children meeting strangers online. Don’t even get me started about the time in the 10^th grade I was responsible for a girl who decided to go off and meet a guy she met on MySpace in a Home Depot parking lot while we were on a YMCA trip…she was a piece of work if there ever was one.  There is no ability to trust on sites like Facebook and MySpace. You are there to connect with your classmates, family, and coworkers and it is the real life connection that allows you to come together online, that is your bond.  You are able to grow and develop your relationship via these sites by realizing other common interests posted on each others’ profiles.

On the other side of the social networking spectrum are the niche interest and hobbies sites. People rally together for everything you can imagine, from ship-in-a-bottle building to gastric bypass surgery recovery to widows of the U.S. Navy. Such sites have allowed people with unique personalities and situations to come together and find solace in the fact that they’re not as weird/hopeless/out of place/alone as they previously thought they were.  That is awesome. And it’s one of the greatest things to come out of the internet revolution. While I’m skirting the topic, I feel I should also address the harm the internet has caused by such sites, where naysayers have attacked and bullied site members, for whatever reason. We’ve been hearing much about online bullying lately with the tragic occurrences of gay teen suicide due to harassment on social networking sites. These stories are indeed heartbreaking to hear and should never happen but the stories we hardly ever hear are those about the lives the internet has saved, simply by connecting people and creating a network of support. The conclusion that I’ve come to is that there are two different kinds of connectivity in the social networking world. The first is one I would never want to meet people through because the audience is far too large and ambiguous. The second however, has the potential to make the world a much smaller place for those in its furthest and funniest reaches.