"I'm Petting the Laptop, Which Has You Inside It": Reflecting on Lived Experiences of Online Friendship

2025-06-24

AI Summary

Post-pandemic, online friendships have proliferated, yet their mental health benefits and functional equivalence to offline relationships remain contested—particularly given the field’s predominant reliance on single-platform studies and absence of platform-agnostic, cross-platform analysis. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews, this study employs activity-centered qualitative analysis to examine long-term, intimate online friendships. It identifies two interrelated challenges: stigma from offline social circles and ambivalent community norms. Participants respond through “anti-theoretical” strategies—reflexively reconfiguring communication technologies’ affordances to sustain relational continuity. Moving beyond the traditional strong/weak tie dichotomy, the study advances “temporal stability” as a foundational dimension of relational quality and reconceptualizes online friends as an epistemically marginalized group. These findings provide both a critical theoretical framework and empirical grounding for socially responsive interface design. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Analysis of web-mediated communications, communities, and crowds
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics

Abstract

Online(-only) friendships have become increasingly common in daily lives post-COVID despite debates around their mental health benefits and equivalence to ''real'' relationships. Previous research has reflected a need to understand how online friends engage beyond individual platforms, and the lack of platform-agnostic inquiry limits our ability to fully understand the dynamics of online friendship. We employed an activity-grounded analysis of 25 interviews on lived experiences of close online friendship spanning multiple years. Our findings present unique challenges and strategies in online friendships, such as stigma from real-life circles, an ambivalent relationship with online communities, and counter-theoretical reappropriations of communication technology. This study contributes to HCI research in online communities and social interface design by refocusing prior impressions of strong vs. weak-ties in online social spaces and foregrounding time-stable interactions in design for relationship maintenance through technology. Our work also promotes critical reflection on biased perspectives towards technology-mediated practices and consideration of online friends as an invisible marginalized community.

Problem

• Understanding dynamics of long-term online friendships across platforms
• Addressing stigma and ambivalence in online-only relationships
• Challenging biased perspectives on technology-mediated social practices

Innovation

• Activity-grounded analysis of long-term online friendships
• Refocusing strong vs. weak-ties in online social spaces
• Foregrounding time-stable interactions for relationship maintenance