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RE: Friends.
I know i may not be the person you were expecting to respond, but I think i can help you out here.
I'd have to say, without a doubt, that you can have friends, even best friends, over the internet. You may not know someone's real name, gender, but you do know them. Imagine geckosquid in person. I'm sure you don't imagine him as part gecko part squid and you don't think of him as an indescribable person. You don't know what he looks like, but you do know how he interacts with others and have your own opinion about him. So if you have an opinion about him than you are assigning certain attributes to his non-physical characteristics. You assess whether or not you like these characteristics and treat him accordingly. Do you treat every single person equally on kiwike? Most likely the answer is no. This means you are more friendly to some which, by definition, to be more friendly to some, you have to be friends or enemies with them.
Also, you can say that friendships made through the internet are actually more honest friendships because you don't have the ability to make the conscious or subconscious prejudices against different genders, races, etc.
Hypothetically (to take it to the extreme which is sometimes needed to prove a point)you could be a 90 year old KKK member who lives in America that also absolutely despises obese people and I could be a 14 year old 700 lbs. African American who lives in Djibouti and we could be best friends for 3 years on kiwike.
In todays society we are so heavily influenced by society saying we have to act a certain way, look a certain way and do everything the way everyone else does or else we are considered outcasts. Internet relationships allow us to escape from these illogical biases everyone has by having people get to know each other BEFORE revealing information such as social class, gender, name, age etc.
To put this all into a scenario:
If geckosquid had made his name Just_call_me_Bob, but everything else about him was the same would you have a different opinion about him or would you just call him something else until he tells you his real name (if he ever chose to).
So why should we judge someone by their name?
Now, if geckosquid had acted as I did (immaturely), would you still have the same relationship with as you do today or would you think of him as you think of me?
So we should judge people by their characteristics and not by physical qualities.
To close:
I think for some Internet Relationships are too revealing about themselves. This is because we make many internal excuses in face to face interactions about why someone didn't respond to meeting us as we thought they would. This leads to so many what if's...
What if I had shaved this morning, would they have responded differently?
What if i was a different race?
What if i was another gender?
What if my shoe color scheme was black and sky blue not navy blue?
My time on kiwike was almost like a kick in the face because I couldnt make all the "What if" excuses in my head and taught me that true friends can come from the initial biases we hold against people and they certainly can come from internet interactions. You held interactions with the same people for 2-3 years and i'm sure they had their ups and downs, but you managed to create a relationship without a preceding prejudice which is pretty damn cool.
A great question to ask your teacher if you want to truly get your point across is:
Can you name five friends who didn't hold you to any standards at all until they knew you as a person?
then you can go on to name five people you now know in Kiwike who you didn't have any preconceived notions about who they were and now, after getting to know them as people, you learned their names etc. which was good because it didn't make you form any opinions about them without any basis in the opinions.
I know there are at least a few grammatical errors and also a major error or two, but i wanted to share my two cents.
-Jordan
AKA jyanowitz or Just_call_me_Bob
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