Friendships In A Digital Age – What You NEED To Know

Friendships in a digital age!

Being a Millennial myself, I pretty much grew up with the digital age. I’m in that perfect middle ground where the Internet was slowly rising and becoming more popular in the 90s. I literally learned how to use a mouse and keyboard as a kid. But more importantly related to this topic, I was able to experience online communication at a pretty young age. PS have you heard of MSN Messenger or ICQ? That’s how long I’ve been chatting online!

So you could say I have a lot of experience with both communicating online and offline. And to me, you need to find a balance if you’re going to chat with friends online. This is especially true post-pandemic. We’ve seen the negative effects of being forced to socialize online during the height of the pandemic. So it’s important to not overly rely on using online communication to socialize with friends.

What are the things you should know? That’s what I’ll be talking about today!

In this post, I’ll go over friendships in a digital age and how to best balance your social life offline and online. While communicating online is a great and convenient to keep in touch with friends, it has its drawbacks. I’ll go over what you need to know.

Alright, let’s get started!

The advantages of friendships in a digital age.

I feel like the pandemic and being forced socialize online during this time, there’s been a negative association with online communication. For example, there have been studies showing that Gen Z has been stunted socially due to the pandemic. So when it comes to online communication like social media and messaging apps, they can get a bad rep.

But let’s not forget the great and wonderful things that the digital age has brought us and for you. To start, not only are you able to talk to your friends from a long distance, you also can communicate with them instantly. Sure, we’ve had telephones to do this back then. But it was expensive and audio only. Now we can instantly video chat with friends from far away. That is an amazing feature to have!

This allows us to manage and socialize with many different friends and acquaintances (click here to see how many friends you should have in your 30s). Back then, it would have been practically difficult to manage so many people with your telephone. But now with social media like Facebook and WhatsApp, you can easily stay in touch with acquaintances like your coworkers and college friends!

Being able to communicate online is such a huge convenience. If I want to make plans with someone, I can easily send them a message and we can instantly figure it out. Back then, you’d have to call someone and communicate verbally how to meet up, which is a lot slower. But now, you can message right away and send a map and directions at the same time!

And I myself have found it great to communicate with friends and acquaintances online. For example, when I post a random thought or topic on Facebook, I have all sorts of friends I’ve met that will comment on it. This provides a unique bonding not only for me, but for my other friends as well. We’ve never had that opportunity before, and I think it’s great we can do this now.

However, there are some downfalls with friendships in the digital age…

The pitfalls of online communication

Growing up in the digital age myself, I can attest to how different it is to communicate online. Here are a few…

• Intent. This is the biggest issue when it comes to messaging and talking to someone online. It is SO easy to misinterpret what your friends are saying to you, and vice versa. For example, you message a friend and you see that they saw the message but didn’t reply. Are they busy, or are they ignoring you? Maybe they are busy, but you take it the wrong way and think they’re ignoring you. Stuff like this is easy to misinterpret online, and it can negatively affect a friendship.

• Not the same as being face-to-face. I don’t know what it is, but talking to someone online will never be the same as talking to them in-person. Maybe it’s the expressions, body language or the subconscious of seeing someone physically in front of you. Even though we have video chat to see someone in front of us online, it’s just not the same as being face-to-face with someone, at least from my experience. And that’s why I believe that online communication will never completely replace being face-to-face with someone. We are human and it’s my belief we need real social interactions in-person.

So how do you balance all this? Let’s find out.

• Prioritize seeing your friends in-person. Again, nothing will replace being with your friends face-to-face. There is something about non-social cues, expressions, voice tone and more that you may not necessarily get with online interactions. Plus it’s more fun to hangout with friends than talking online, at least in my experience. I know it may be hard in your 30s to prioritize time for your friends. But make it an effort, because it’s essential to keeping your friendships going.

• Make your intents clear online. As mentioned previously, online communication can easily be misinterpreted. You just don’t have the physical social cues online that you normally would in-person. So in general, I try to exaggerate or make it very clear when I chat online. For example, if I want to show that I’m laughing, then I will add an emoji to make it clear that it’s a humorous situation, not a serious one. Or if I want to be serious online and make my intentions clear, I’ll use synthax like short serious sentences and capital letters. Or if I feel like something can be misinterpreted (e.g. ignoring a friend), then I’ll explain myself if needed (e.g. “I am busy right now, I’ll get back to you later). I feel that being clear and intentional online is very important.

• It’s all about balance. Online communication is a great tool to keep in touch with friends, but it has its limits. You can only connect and bond with friends so much that seeing each other in-person is the next best thing to do. Having to message a bunch of friends and acquaintances can be overwhelming. And while online communication can feel like you’re artificially satisfying your social needs, it truly is not the same. Just remember to go out and be social away from the electronics.

Conclusion

I hope you found this post helpful. Online messaging and chatting should be a supplement to help support and foster your friendships. In my opinion, it shouldn’t be a crutch as the only way you talk to people. We’re human; we need to socialize in real life. That’s my opinion at least. 🙂

If you have any questions or feedback, leave them in the comments below!