In his article, The Virtual Community, Harold Rheingold discusses the number of ways in which the interconnections he's established through a virtual community has affected his real life. Rheingold holds the opinion that the interactions that occur virtually have implications no less real than the ones people have regularly in face to face situations. This is because of our emotional and intellectual stock in this world as well as the fact that one could potentially meet someone in person whom they had originally met online.
I thought one of the main discomforts or oddities that he expressed was meeting people that you already know in a virtual way but not having a face to associate with their personality (RDC, 273). At a WELL party he had interacted with these people and told them intimate details of his life. In an emotional sense he very much knew them but in a physical way they were strangers, maybe even unrecognizable. For people at the time in which he was writing this article, and even now, this was a very strange almost paradox. How can you know someone you've never met? I'm tempted to ask another question; how can you know someone you've met? I think Rheingold hits dead on what is really important about human interaction, the way it makes us feel. It is not about the way things are but rather the way things seem, and we can honestly never truly know if we are totally correct. Even if the people who meet each other online have never so much as shaken hands the emotions their conversations evoke can be just as real. Rheingold "shared alliances and formed bonds, fallen off my chair laughing with [people], [and became] livid with anger with some of them" (RDC, 273). Still there is, in my opinion, a difference in the relationship, not to say it is not real.
I would be interested to see if you put a group people together in a room that had spoken extensively online and did not allow them to say their names or any other identifying factor if they could identify the strangers by personality. It might be a difficult task. I agree with Rheingold that the internet lets people geographically distant from each other become close, but it also gives them time. It is not insignificant that we are hidden behind a screen. Even when people want to be honest they also want to put their best foot forward, a luxury that the normal confines of face to face human interaction doesn't afford lest they be left standing awkwardly while the other person thinks of exactly what the say and who to be.
I love the analogy of the virtual communities as petri dishes and the idea that this accidental web has grown rather spontaneously out of something unexpected. Rheingold attributes it to our natural desire to have community, and I don't disagree. But more important than this desire for community is the way in which people have restructured the way in which community can be defined, the evolutions as Rheingold refers to. Originally there may not have been an established online social code but there definitely is one now. There is a whole language of internet speak. There are rules about email, IMing, facebook messaging or wall-posting. Rules just as unspoken as the ones in everyday social society a no longer confined to a small subculture but now extended to the many people using the internet.