Virtual Friendship and Virtual Loneliness: Two Fragile Mind-Sets of 14-Year-Old Adolescents

• In Event: Digital Socialization: Growing Up in a Novel Social Space

Abstract

Purpose of the study
One of the central problems of an intensive internet relationship is the fact that some people are in an intensive exchange, but do not really know the person on the other side. Believing in the realities of the virtual world is tantamount to thinking or imagining people without having a reliable and valid idea of them. The consequences, if the expectations of closeness and the exchange of secrets and valuable interactive goods with other people are not fulfilled, can be dramatically negative and disappointing. The opposite of this state is true friendship.

Theoretical framework
Internet loneliness differs from general loneliness (Nielsen, 2000). Especially when one of the Internet protagonists gets into difficulties or psychological emergencies, nobody is there and the feeling of being empty becomes serious. This is where the concept of the parallel world (Astleitner, 2013) comes in. It is conceivable that a) people are lonely without reference to the Internet, b) people have extensive Internet activities but are not lonely, c) people do not experience Internet loneliness, but also do not show intensive Internet use, and d) people carry out extensive Internet activities and extensive Internet loneliness (Spitzer, 2016).

Method
In this presentation we want to highlight the difference between real peer relationships (intensity) and Internet relationships (frequency) - based on the concepts of Selman (1984) for the development of friendships and Sharabi and Margalit (2011) for social distress.

Data sources
The data come from a Swiss module of the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) of the IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement). 2974 randomly selected students were asked about both their virtual friendship intensity and their real friendship network (scaling based on main component analysis).

Results
Descriptive results show that 24% of students practice intensive Internet friendship, 28% think they miss real friendship because of the Internet and 39% do not use the Internet for real relationships. In addition, 79% of students have real friendships that are not directly related to the Internet. From a correlative point of view, we found that the higher virtual friendships are rated, the lower the value of real friendship (r=-.11; p<.000). And when a higher degree of loneliness is felt on the Internet, the less loneliness embedded in real friendship situations is considered. The results explain why it is easier for 8-graders to build important friendships without using the Internet, despite intensive Internet use.

Significance of the study
In summary, it can be said that friendship can be experienced simultaneously, both in virtuality and in reality, but with different values. Loneliness also develops in both forms. But on the Internet, in addition to the core question of loneliness, this also includes the levels of lost hope and lost illusions. In this contribution we will critically discuss these empirical results as well as a theoretical classification of the topic.

Authors

• Fritz K. Oser, University of Fribourg

• Horst Biedermann, Saint Gallen University of Teacher Education