Hard Mode

There's this fear with meeting friends made over the internet that was very much assumed to me by my family and their friends growing up. That these people who you may view as a colleague, friend, maybe even family, will in the real world, turn out to be nothing like who they are when behind the luxury of anonymity and a muffled headset...

But I've been doing this for a while now, and I've been lucky enough to meet multiple friends from multiple friend groups all over the world and most recently, all in person in the same place at the same time, and this deception nightmare I've not experienced one time.

That's not to say that it isn't possible.

One of the dangers of the internet is that it can't possibly match the communication of being face to face.

My random anecdote was from an ancient BBC Clarkson documentary, so I'm not going to fight to the death for this source's accuracy, but when talking about the history of the telephone, a speech scientist claimed it removes 55% of communication.

More than half of what we as people use to judge someone's character is completely absent over a Discord server.

There's things that can obviously be done to adjust that, but no matter how good someone's Webcam is, and no matter how one to one their microphone is to their real voice, there just won't be an equal to talking to someone face to face until we're able to jack into the Matrix.

As a result, it's incredibly easy for somebody to be two-faced over the internet, to say one thing and do another, to make up stories without needing to prove them, to cloak one's anxieties or deficiencies behind the monitor.

Thing is, that's not the internet.

That's a someone on the internet.

The reason someone can abuse the internet's power to mislead someone at best, or abuse them at worse, is because of a toxic personality.

When someone is a genuine friend, like I've been lucky enough to know so many of over the internet, meeting them in-person has only cemented those friendships, and it makes sense why, because if you've already become friends while lacking over half of what people use to communicate, you've basically been playing human connection on hard mode.

Going from that to being able to see their faces, body-language, and reactions combine with everything else you're already familiar with?

It's the easiest thing in the world.