SL does bring back teen angst. I too am a product of the 80’s materialism often caught without the latest greatest unless I bought it with my hard earned after school job income. SL shopping craziness has allowed me to keep up with the cool kids relatively easily but I still find myself quiet and shy at new venues when surrounded by people I don’t know all that well.

SL friendships and the friends list in general are an interesting phenomenon. They don’t necessarily coincide. I keep people on my list oftentimes way too long because I worry of offending someone. A close friend on my list says if she doesn’t hear from someone more than 2 times a week then they are off the list. I’m not sure which way is the right way. My close friends know who they are and I smile big when I see their names appear online. I try to honor them as well in my profile. I suppose my contacts list ends up being more like my address book… I don’t call or email all those people sometimes for weeks or months.

Thank you again for always giving me a validation or a new thought provoking way to view the SLworld.

Cheers!
Kim

Yes, friendships. I’ve accepted friendships from people I’ve never “seen” (in the sense that I couldn’t find their avi amidst the crowd of bumping and grinding cyber bods on the dance floor). i have had many “friends” that I have never talked to since the day we met and exchanged friendship. All told, I fear I have nothing to say to most of the people on my friends list, but that doesn’t mean i don’t wish them well…it is because I never think of them. There has to be an analogy for this feeling…friends in SL are like those stacks of business cards I have in my top drawer in my office. All told, I probably have about 100. So far, I haven’t only called or emailed about 15, and maybe three of them have become regular correspondents. I wouldn’t mind if one of them emailed me out of the blue and said hi, but I would like it was a bit strange that that they were, perhaps, trying to get something out of me. In SL, as Cindy said, the social aspects (green light goes on, name pops up in right hand corner) certainly affords us the opportunity to connect the moment they enter the world, but I think this urge is Pavlovian and needs to be wrestled with more. I will readily admit that I don’t tend my SL garden–I don’t weed out dead and dying friends and perhaps I don’t nurture and water healthy friends sufficiently. Perhaps that is why, at the and of the day, it is when I get the IM when I am offline, and someone is just letting me know that they are thinking of me, that I am most moved. That asynchronous missive, not a “hi” or a “wb” but something resembling a coherent thought being shared between two complex individuals…that is lovely and rare.

In sum, I suspect that I have been merely repeating Cindy’s point, I will close with an attempt to encapsulate my herd of cats:

When I give you my “friendship” in SL, I am giving nothing of value–it is free and accessible to all. It is when I give you my time that I know we are friends. And if I wake up from a dream in which you are reciting Walt Whitman, then I imagine I am in love.

I’d also say you may be suffering a bit from expectations that may not be totally realistic given that a virtual world is an imprecise approximation of the real world. This isn’t to say that the relationships in SL are not “real” but rather they’re just different and tend to play along slightly different rules. Lower the expectation and focus on doing what you like to do and I think you’ll be happier. If I ever feel “lonely” in SL (which is rare), I just go out somewhere and strike up a conversation with a random avi or find some newb that looks like they need some help. But that’s just me, and as we know, we’re all different.

Now about the fact the silence when you come online can be deafening … so true. On the other hand I don’t know about you Cindy but I don’t multitask all that well. Five or six people in IM and I’m going bonkers. Add to that one who wants to tell me something via Skype and another “ploing” from Google talk and I run screaming. At least for me it’s the reason I don’t greet everyone who pops online.

All that to say I’d rather spend some real time with a friend even though it rarely happens then say hi and leave the person hanging because I can’t even keep up with already ongoing conversations. The old quality over quantity thing …
One thing I noticed though … my best friends in SL are not necessarily the ones I spend most time chatting with but they are a constant and I know they will be there for me when I need them. You know that when you contact them they won’t brush you off or they will just tell you they are busy but propose another time to meet up. I think I know who my friends are in SL even without them being listed as such.

You’re definitively one of them Cindy

I guess what wounds me are the people I felt I did connect with, and their deafening silence. I often wonder if that is a behavior we cultivate in our lives that has transferred to the realm of the social network. Do we find it somehow validating when folks reach out to us first and so we simply wait for someone else to do the work?

Social networking has led to a constant race to accumulate friends online, are maybe as a result we now undervalue the potential they hold. What is the solution?

Do we abandon the Friend concept? Of course not, that would ruin our experience. Maybe if we treat our Friend list more like we would a list of real-world friends things would be different. Most people have a relatively tight social group of friends,with an extended network of acquintences. Would you really consider a list of 100+ contacts friends?

Consider how you make real world friendships. They are based on regular face-to-face contact. If we adapt that to online communities we should maintain Friends with those we have regularl contact, greeting etc. Other wise we should cull our contacts regularly. If we meet someone we like once and enjoy the interaction, sure lets be friends. But, if this friendship does not spawn regular contact in the following mutally online sessions, maybe we should cull them from our friends. After all you dont consider someone you met once in Starbucks a friend if they regularly walk past you in the street.

Just one guys ramblings, but what do you think?