On-line chatting. This technology allows us to communicate to people all over the world and never once actually see them. Sure they may send us a picture of what they look like but that's it. Since we almost never physically interact with these people, do we still develop a friendship?

Sure. I would say that friendship is based on the compatibility of personalities more than anything else. You can work with someone and get along, but not be friends. You can date someone and have sex, but not be friends.

In a way, chatting with someone online is more honest than in real life, since you can say whatever you want without fear of accountability. You can't judge someone based on their race or fashion sense or whatever when you can't even see them. All you have to go on is their words, the opinions they express, the interests they have.

Do you need to be careful who you chat with and confide in? Sure. Take everything with a grain of salt. But how is that significantly different from interacting with other people in everyday life?

Sure. Why not? You don't need to be close enough to fuck someone just to be friends.

Put another way, why would physical interaction be neccessary for friendship? Is appearance that important?

The interaction takes place in cyberspace rather than meatspace, but is no less real for all that. The potential for greater lies is there, certainly, but so is the potential for greater truths. Safe behind a wall of text, most people feel more able to express themselves and expose their deep feelings.

It's like making friends through letter-writing, for pete's sake; nothing wrong with it, it just involves different rules. Rules, I'll admit, that most people can't find with both hands. Like "trust but verify."

Spoken like a true geek.

But yeah, like Toze said, it's just like pen-pals only with a bit more immediacy to it. Thus a friendship can form through internet communication.

To nitpick a semantic argument, while a friendship may occur, commradery cannot.

Unless, y'know, you're in an online rpg, or random group chat - some realtime thing.

Maybe in an RPG, but not in a chatroom without voice and visuals. I doubt it could really form without smelling your comrades. I'm not joking.

ph33r4m0n3z!

Seriously though, he's right; you could form a friendship, but camaraderie comes from... more material things, like fellow-suffering and a level of trust that can't realistically be reached in a purely online relationship. Hell, even Fiss and Senie, The Modern Online Couple, met and got to know each other in meatspace before they made the really big steps in their relationship.

Camaraderie needs a little more then a chatroom or Emails yes... See... Camaraderie forms when you get all your friends into BF-1942 and fight a friggin' WAR for twelve hours against other people.

No. Cameraderie forms when you are in meatspace, stuck between the mad, the bad, and the crazy, and you come down to the real, where you do your job because the guy next to you is gonna get killed if you don't - and you know that the other guy is gonna do his job because he knows you'll get killed if he don't.

Friendship and cameraderie are different. There're a lot of people I'd hang out with that I wouldn't trust to tell me the time of day... And there're some people from when I was in Kuwait in '91 that I can't stand whom I would trust with my life. I wouldn't trust 'em with my money or my woman, but I'd trust 'em with my life. Go figure.,..

Character's a funny thing.

I posit that beating the living bejesus out of each other can also form camaraderie, and look forward to eventually forming some with MJD in the next couple of years. (Missed kung fu today on account of my gut being unsettled, boo me. I will practice extra this week to make up for it.)