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Internet friends and the real world

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RedLion:
Despite the fact that I'm active of several forums and message boards, the vast majority of my friends are still made face-to-face. I'd say that my online pals are more of close acquaintances.

However, my personality has certainly been affected by the mannerisms and ways of speaking that people on different forums have. Again, it's more influenced by people who are actually physically present and who I see every day or every few days, but the personalities of people who I know pretty well on the forums definitely rub off on me and I find myself picking up some of their phrases or traits.

Scandanavian War Machine:
i don't think i've ever met someone online before meeting them in person.

then again, i lived in a fairly secluded area that didn't have internet available until i was already almost done with highschool anyway (i used it before then, obviously, at school and friends houses but never in my own home); and even now this is the only forum i belong to. besides that, i have a Myspace and profiles on Last.fm and DeviantArt but the last two are rarely used and Last.fm is just for my own benefit to track my music listening habits and to maybe hear new bands.
and Myspace is strictly for communicating with people who i already know.

i guess it's worth mentioning that don't have a very large group of "real-life" friends and none of them are really internet users in the sense that we all are. they go to YouTube and Myspace and look at porn but they would never even think of joining a forum or message board. it's absolutely inconceivable to them. but every once in a while i find myself trying to use a joke or phrase or something from the internet and they just stare blankly because they have absolutely no clue what i'm talking about.

however, they have thankfully grown accustomed to my using "Fight you!" regularly so i don't have to explain myself every time i say it at least.

edit: forgot to mention that i'm 21, if that's relevent.

Nodaisho:
I am 16, and all of my friends I have made on the internet stayed that way, even the person that ended up being in the same city. I like how you can make friends with people that live on the other side of the world, my gaming clan has a few regulars from Scotland, the culture differences can be interesting. All of my real life friends are still interacted with in real life for the most part, aside from a few emails. That probably is largely because my best friend is still on dial-up, so it is much easier to just call him.

We had the internet for long enough that I don't recall precisely when we got it, might have been when we got our first computer with a CD drive rather than just a floppy drive. We are usually on the back wave of tech trends, had dial-up for quite a while, I was 12 or 13 when we got relatively slow DSL, and last year we switched to comcast cable, I know, I know, but the DSL kept losing connection and we would have to unplug and replug the router, it could happen just from watching too many youtube videos in a row. And when you go from a 500kB/s down to a 5000kB/s connection, the difference is very noticeable.

Ninja'ed by Scandinavian, but that reminds me, what is the story behind FIGHT YOU!?

morca007:
For a different perspective:

I post on a camera forum mostly made up of people 50+ with a good deal of retirees. These people are much more apt (it seems to me) to go and actually meet their internet friends for coffee and the like. They have regional meet ups all the time. Furthermore, their online feuds seem much more intense than the ones on forums filled with young people, they seem to take things more personally.

That forum has taught me two things:
-Old people are awesome.
-Painful "new to the internets" mistakes are way funnier when the people making them are old (Things like signing every one of your posts... right above your signature, flaming, not knowing how to use vbulletin).

Jimmy the Squid:
I'm actually still fairly new to the internet. I'm 21 but up until I was 17 the most experience I ever had with computers was drawing trucks and shit with CAD in my "computer science" class in junior high, up until i moved into my dads place and he bought me a pc I used an old typewriter of my grandfathers to type my highschool essays or I hand wrote everything. As it stands I usually don't really understand a lot of what people say (for instance I don't get "fight you", "tl:dr" or a lot of other things) until I take one of the australian forumites aside and ask them what it is, sheepishly. That said, being on this forum for the past 2 years has made me more open minded to a lot of things and I've made friends with some really awesome people. Internetspeak has also infiltrated my daily vernacular and I often find myself talking to my meatlife friends about something funny that people I know in Yorkshire, Scotland and Boston have said and they look at me weird for having what I consider to be really good friendships with people I've never high-fived.

I use the internet mainly for doing uni research and being on this (and another) forum. I use msn sometimes to speak to people if I can't be bothered to call them but to be honest, the majority of my time is spent posting here or on other internet forums. I tend not to keep in touch with people I went to high school with or even people who I did my undergrad degree with (and that only finished last year). A lot of my meatlife friendships are based on propinquity whereas I actually feel connected to everyone I've "met" here a lot more strongly.

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