Is Virtual Friendship different than F2F Friendships?

Yesterday I read a great article in BusinessWeek entitled, What's a Friend Worth: Companies are Scrambling to Decode New Data About Our Online Relationships, Hoping for Profitable Insights by Stephen Baker.

"Decoding friendship many believe, could be key to getting consumers' attention"...Facebook, Google, and Yahoo hire leading sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconmists from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley. Microsoft just established a research division focused on social sciences in Cambridge, Mass." (We spent a lot of time studying social learning theories in my doctoral program at Pepperdine).

One of the things researchers are looking at to determine the strength of an online relationship is whether or not communication travels in both directions. This is something I'm looking at in my dissertation where I'm looking at transformative communication patterns in 1-to-1 laptop programs.

IBM encourages their workers to be involved in social networks. "Each new friend plugs an IBM worker into another sphere of knowledge and human contacts".

This concept aligns with the underpinnings of an online course I teach entitled Technology Literacy 102: Building Knowledge Management Systems. You can learn more about this course on our professional development website.

In reference to the title of this post, Is Virtual Friendship Different than f2f (face-to-face) friendships I would say it depends. I just helped chair a committee that wrote a paper on social networking in education. One of the things our committee discussed is that social networking can be hard to explain because it is user defined. Each person determines their purpose for using it, so there in no one way to use it. In the BusinessWeek article they are talking about how businesses are trying to tap-in to online networks as a way to promote themselves. In other ways, using viral marketing techniques. I think one of the things these tools provide us with is the ability to expand our networks to people on a massive scale never possible before.