Royane Real
Internet Friendships
By Royane Real
Author of “Your Guide to Finding Friends, Making Friends and Keeping Friends”
Before the Internet came along, having a pen pal was a lot harder than it is today. It used to be that if you wanted to find yourself a penpal, you had to find international pen pal organizations who could help to connect you with someone in another country. Then you had to write your letters by hand, put them in the mailbox, and wait many weeks for a reply.
It’s hard to imagine nowadays how long it used to take to communicate with people who lived in a different city or a different country. Long distance telephone calls often used to be so expensive that only the rich could afford to call up someone overseas just to chat. In the past, having a penpal was considered something exotic and unique. Not many people tried to have foreign penpals. That has all changed.
Now, any of us can easily have online friendships with people in other countries because of the internet and other communication devices.
Today we are able to communicate quickly and cheaply over great distances. The techniques for finding new friends in other countries and communicating with them has been greatly simplified and speeded up. In just a few minutes of searching online, we can find websites that offer the possibility of online friendship, and sometimes even romance. We can add our personal profile to the site and we can send and receive messages in an instant.
In addition to sites that offer the opportunity to make international pen pals, there are many other kinds of social networking sites available today. Or you can meet other people by participating in forums organized around some of your favorite topics and issues.
Will you online friends turn into real friends? In some cases, it does happen. People sometimes find others they enjoy communicating with online, and gradually sharing more and more of themselves with their email pal.
There is always a danger with making friends online. Not everyone is who he seems to be. It is all too easy to create a new persona for yourself on line. In most cases, this can be harmless fun, but occasionally some of the people who pretend to be someone they are not, can be hiding some evil intentions.
So, if you are interested in exploring the world of making friends on line, go ahead, but remember to be careful about revealing too much of yourself until you are absolutely sure about the other person.
( The introductory comments which appear above are by friendship expert Royane Real, author of the popular book “Your Guide to Finding Friends, Making Friends and Keeping Friends” It is available at http://www.lulu.com/real )
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