Like I said, lil, I have thoughts, but I don't know what they are. I'll try. What's for sure is that an online community I joined in early 2006 definitively changed my life, and even though I've never yet physically met any of the members I've been interacting with for years (mostly because they live in Australia), I would jump at the chance to.

In some areas they 100 percent know more about me than even my closest childhood friends (and of course vice versa) -- it's like what thenewgreen said above: I interact with the internet much more often and more conveniently than I do with friends who live all over the country. That's the key. For instance, none of my childhood friends know that I'm going to stack a bunch of fucking bricks in a pile this weekend and call it a bookshelf, but thenewgreen does. Etc.

The sad downside is that it's very easy to lose touch with internet friends, and it's often a very vague process. One of the core members of our IRC channel killed himself a few years ago and another went to jail for nine months -- but others just gradually stopped logging in. In a way this makes the whole process even more bittersweet; I'm reasonably sure I'll still know a fair number of my childhood friends when I'm 40, but I can't really see myself still frequenting internet chat rooms. Who knows. Times are changing.

So I guess what I ended up talking about, lil, was the odd dichotomy between becoming extremely close with online friends, but having very tenuous links to them, and knowing that at any moment they might disappear. In our friendships we have to trade intimacy for security? Not always, certainly, but the lack or presence of longterm ties in large part contributes to what we say to each other.