by Stefanie Chow

Created on: July 18, 2009   Last Updated: July 19, 2009

Over the past few decades, the dominance of the man-operated era has been replaced by the advent of the virtual world. Casual meetings at cafes, simple board games, and weekend trips to the local library are slowly diminishing. The current generations have begun to usher in a plethora of online networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace, as well as several role-playing game (RPG) networks worldwide. This frenzy of social networking inevitably encourages the formation of virtual relationships Internet friends that have never met in real life, or intimate online relationships that seem nonexistent when the two individuals meet in-person. A major concern arises when discussing the benefits of virtual relationships and their effects on real life relationships. Does interacting with humans over the Internet help us or hurt us? Let's take a look.

POSITIVE ASPECTS

Stay connected One of the most appealing features of social networking sites is having the ability to keep in touch with more people without the effort of picking up the phone or driving to hang out. Just add friends, family, schoolmates, and co-workers to your list of friends, and they are only a few minutes away from a wall post or private message. Virtual relationships are often the only way of contacting friends from other states and countries, but do contemporary generations value quality or quantity when staying connected via social networking sites?

More convenience Because of the increasingly technological world, computers make multitasking much easier. Simultaneously sending an email, instant messaging ten friends, shopping online, and checking your Facebook hardly takes any effort, compared to getting away from the computer. Maintaining ten virtual relationships is far more convenient than preserving one friendship in real life. Two friends that do not interact in real life may instant message each other until 1:00 AM, simply because it is more convenient. But where does convenience end and the laziness begin? What role does effort play in determining the strength of a relationship?

Sharing ideas Human beings connect through knowledge and intellect. We form relationships based on the ideas we share with others who can offer an expansion of those ideas. This is achieved through discussions of different topics in forums, blogs, and so on. An obvious advantage to virtual relationships is the sharing of ideas between different groups of individuals with different and types of knowledge

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