How much do you value your online friendships?

Some of my best friends are people I have never met. Some of them are people I first got to know online, then met in person. And still others are people I may never see again, but with whom I maintain ongoing contact.

Could an online friendship be as rich, as meaningful, and as rewarding as one in the offline world?

I don’t see why not. The web has changed the nature of friendship, certainly in my experience. Now, the vast majority of my social interactions are electronic, via email, text, chat, internet forums or Facebook. (In fact, right now, apart from going to church or the shops, all of my interactions with other human beings are in electronic form.)

Granted, there are times when a face-to-face conversation would be nice, but in the case of friends who live in the US or Sweden, that’s not possible. And, while I am something of a Facebook slut — I occasionally find myself going through my list of “friends” and thinking “Who the hell is this person?” — the web has made it possible to form friendships with people I would otherwise never have met, people whose presence in my world I have come to value deeply.

Some academics, notably the distinguished neuroscientist Professor Susan Greenfield, have raised concerns about the dominance of screen culture in human interactions, especially amongst children. During an interview on ABC the other night, she expressed concerns about how, in a two-dimensional world, there is no room for the kind of cues normally present in communication: prosody, body language and pheromones play no role in online interactions.

But perhaps that is not entirely a bad thing. How many of us judge others, not on the opinions they express, but on their physical appearance? Online interactions may occasionally be reminiscent of road rage in the way that the cloak of anonymity permits some to throw basic courtesy out the window, but they also free us from the burden of judgment according to race, age, weight, sex, dress, accent and, by extension, social class.

On what do we base our friendships, really? It seems to me that, online, it is the important things that matter: your opinions, what matters to you, your sense of humour, the interests you have in common. You assess whether or not you like people based on qualities that are more than skin deep. None of this thinking somebody is like, so awesomely hot until they reveal that, shock horror, they’re a bit racist, or think the historians who deny the Holocaust have a point.

Of course, online friendships do tend to evolve beyond this rather ascetic perfection where relationships truly are a meeting of minds. It is human nature to want to know more about those with whom we converse, and so, gradually, we ferret out personal details and fill in the blanks.

As time passes, we learn how old somebody is, what gender he or she is, sexual orientation, whether or not he or she is married, has children and so on. We slip back into assessing the views of others and assigning importance to them based on external cues. So criticism of the ANC is so much more impressive if it comes from a black South African, or Israel by a Jew, and so it goes, until we are right back where we started.

But in the mean time, I like to think, as we form new connections, we get to learn something valuable about ourselves and others. And that can only be a good thing.