Online Friendships: New Form of Relationships
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2007 |
| Type | R&D Presentation |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Friendships arising and often existing only in the virtual environment are a new form of relationships becoming common with the Internet development. In the Czech Republic, 54% of people are using the Internet, there is 88% penetration among adolescents aged 12 - 19 years and the Internet penetration is still increasing (source: World Internet Project 2006). In this presentation, basic statistics about online friendship relationships are shown and two ways of approach to this type of friendship are analysed. The presented research questions were included in a questionnaire survey carried out within the framework of the Czech part of the "World Internet Project" research (www.worldinternetproject.org). The survey sampled 1,706 respondents aged 12 years or more, the sample was representative according to the population of the Czech Republic, data were collected in September 2006. 38% of the Czech Internet users stated that they have friends on the Internet who they do not know in reality, which corresponds to 21% from the whole population. Men stated to have some more online friends than woman and adolescents seem to have much more online friends than adults. Two types of approach to the online friendship have been revealed: the first one may be entitled as "true friendship", the second "topic oriented friendship". In a "true friendship", people have more online friends very close friends to them, they discuss intimate problems with them, and they also say that they can rely on these online friends, trying to transfer these online friendships into the real world. In a "topic oriented friendship", people claim to discuss other themes with online friends than with people from their real lives; online friends are completely different from real life friends and these online friends moral quality is not important. The second type of friendship appears more frequently in communities and seems to be focussed more on the specific topic of interest rather than on developing the relationship (friendship) as such. Both patterns of the approaches to the online friendship are stable according to the age and gender. |
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