Faceless Friends

Since the internet first came about it has changed the way in which the world interacts and digital media has set in place new developments in social relationships.

Chat rooms have played an important role in the evolution of digital interpersonal communication. E-mail came first in 1972, then came USENET, an e-mail based newsgroup started in 1979. Newsgroups became bulletin boards and some bulletin board users wanted to interact with the group in real time instead of waiting to reply to an ongoing message thread. In the late '70s and early '80s, several small bulletin board communities incorporated chat and IM into their networks and so followed the faceless friend. With the invention of chatrooms came a shift in the social paradigm and assumption that you had to know someone to talk to them. Chatrooms allowed strangers to interract, innocently but anonnymously.

This was a huge change in the social paradigm and the idea of internet pals or faceless friends difficult to comprehend for some people. Not all chatroom communication was with strangers. MSN developed an IM service which enabled you to add your friends and reject those you didn’t know, however you could add random strangers if you wished.

With the number of chatrooms growing and the amount of people using them also increasing they started to become surrounded with bad press in regard to the dangers that the annonymity presented. Chatrooms supposedly became haunts for peadophiles and perverts and so without surprise their popularity decreased and it was something frowned upon.

Now chatrooms are virtually dead and social networking sites are now a big part of modern interraction. Facebook, Ebay, Windows Live Messenger and Google are the top 4 visited sites on the web (Neates, 2008) 3 of which are social sites with Facebook having over 500million users (Facebook. 2011).

With social networking growing and growing without anyone battering an eyelid is it really that different to chat rooms? In all fairness you can add or reject friends and identity is a big part of your social media profile but anonymity is still possible, so is interaction with strangers. They may not appear to be ‘faceless friends’ or as risky as talking to a username in a chat room but it’s quite easy to take on a fakeidentity.

The dangers of online communications are vast; hidden identities, cyber bullying, hacking into accounts etc. With online communication becoming a big part of social interaction the dangers shouldn’t be overlooked. Especially seeing as it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere…