E-friendships live, breath only through e-mail
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BY TIM BARKER / St. Louis Post-Dispatch
During the past year, Lisa Langeneckert and Lisa Cepluch have shared many things. They talk about relationships, hobbies, illnesses, work, family and pets.
But despite spending most of their lives separated by a 20-minute drive, neither has actually laid eyes on the other. Or heard the other’s voice.
It is a friendship that lives and breathes through e-mail.
And it’s not for everyone. After all, how can you call someone a friend if you can’t pick them out of a crowded room? Some experts even question whether such friendships — particularly those based only on text exchanges — can ever be as strong as the more traditional variety.
Then there’s that nagging fear. The one that makes you wonder if the person on the other end of that cyber tether is really who she says she is.
Still, the pairing of the two women demonstrates the Internet’s ability to bring together strangers separated by any number of barriers, including geography, age and occupation. While both work in the legal field — Langeneckert is an attorney for a downtown St. Louis firm, and Cepluch is a secretary for a Clayton, Mo., firm — they are convinced they would never have met if not for their participation in an online network that finds homes for pets.
“Lisa and I would never run into each other in daily life. And the chances of us striking up a conversation would be very small,” said Cepluch, who does have one slight advantage over her friend, having once looked up Langeneckert’s photo on the law firm’s Web site.
They talk as if a real-life meeting is inevitable. But they wonder if it will change their friendship.
“In some ways, it’s probably deeper because of the anonymity,” Langeneckert said. “I don’t know if meeting would ruin that.”
‘Pen pals on steroids’
The idea of calling someone a friend without seeing her in person might seem strange. Yet it is hardly new, said Dmitri Williams, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Southern California, where he teaches a class on online communities.
“We used to call them pen pals. This is just pen pals on steroids,” Williams said. “If you pooh-pooh these relationships, you are missing out on something.”
But there are reasons to be cautious before becoming emotionally attached to a stranger, particularly when there are legions of scammers trolling the Internet for victims.
Consider the recent case of a St. Charles County, Mo., woman who developed an online relationship with a man who claimed to live in Mississippi. About eight months into their friendship, her friend sent an urgent request for money, saying he was stranded in Nigeria. She sent $4,500, and he disappeared.
The woman ended up getting her money back. And the man went to prison. But the case highlights a harsh reality of cyberspace.
And it’s one of the reasons security experts recommend taking it slow with online friendships, urging people to be careful about revealing too much personal information too soon. Generally speaking, those cyber friends should be treated with more skepticism than the ones you meet in the real world, said Simeon Spearman, an analyst for Social Technologies, a futurist research and consulting firm based in Washington.
If you do find someone you hit it off with, it never hurts to invest a little effort into confirming your new friend’s honesty.
“Get them to talk to you on the phone or in video chat,” Spearman said. “I wouldn’t recommend hiring a private investigator or anything like that.”
Becoming close
But online relationships are a bit more complicated than simply verifying identities. Experts say the bigger challenge is getting that friendship beyond the casual acquaintance stage when you are only communicating through text.
“It’s hard to learn enough about somebody’s life to become a part of it,” said Robert Kraut, a professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. “Unless you inject phone calls or personal visits, the relationship never gets stronger.”
Liz Willnow of Collinsville, Mo., has seen this firsthand.
For more than a decade, she’s been corresponding with folks she met on a forum dedicated to the television show “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.” While the cult hit ended its run in 2003, the message board and the friendships have continued.
They talk about family and relationships, exchange recipes and share advice. But Willnow draws a firm line between online friends and those in her real world.
“If somebody asked me to name my best friends, I wouldn’t count any of them,” she said. “I think of them as my hobbyist friends.”
Others say it doesn’t have to be that way for relationships originating online. The convenience factor alone — it’s less time-consuming to chat online than it is to go down to Starbucks for an hour — can make it easier to meet and keep in touch with friends, said Edita Kaye, founder of the Association of Virtual Worlds.
“These friendships are very strong in many ways. They’re just different,” Kaye said. “I don’t think it’s superficial.”
Neither does Kim Benfield of Florissant, Mo., who met a man about two years ago on a singles Web site. He lives less than an hour away, in Columbia, Ill. They talk on the phone but have yet to meet.
“It’s weird. He’s like my best friend. But I couldn’t pick him out of a crowd,” Benfield said. “All I know is that he has blond hair.”
She’s long past the stage of wondering if he’s being honest about himself. Among other things, she said, he’s a regular churchgoer.
Then, with a laugh: “But my dad said he could be like Jeffrey Dahmer.”
Easy to open up
The anonymity of the Internet is often pointed out by critics who say the medium is too easy to abuse. But others say the feature does have some strong advantages in terms of getting people to open up with one another.
It’s easier to say what’s on your mind when you don’t have to look another person in the eyes, said Robert Bornstein, a psychology professor at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y.
“The confessional in the Catholic church is set up that way for just this reason,” Bornstein said. “It’s also, by the way, the reason (Sigmund) Freud would have people lie on a couch.”
And if people aren’t 100 percent honest, that’s not always the end of the world.
Heather Parks of St. Louis has been making friends online for more than a decade, generally with no expectations of meeting those people in the physical realm. The idea that some of them might be lying about themselves doesn’t faze her.
“I guess maybe you don’t always know,” Parks said. “But if I’m not going to meet them anyway, I really don’t care.”
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