The current world of online communication has enabled many people to get in touch with those that were impossible to keep in touch with before. People from neighboring cities, neighboring countries and neighboring continents, as well as people from different sides of the world, have become part of our ‘online contacts.’ I like this word, ‘contact’, as it excludes the word friends from its title, yet somehow it manages to mean that these people we know online are our online friends.

Such a terminology has enabled us to do something very well in addition to keeping in touch. It has allowed us to go to such online friends and express our emotions, as if such friends are bells we ring whenever we feel down, sad, depressed, lonely or feeling rejected as well as dejected. Not only can you get close to your friends whenever you want them, you can use either instant messages or emails to express the painful experience you went through. You can talk about your worries, about your life, about what makes you happy and how you’re not happy. In turn, you get a virtual reply of two sorts. The first one offers you comfort, and offers you some solutions as to how to become happy. The second sort of a reply is when you’re instant messaging someone and your instant message gets the response “User abc has signed out.” Those instant messages let you know that your depression is unwelcome.

And why shouldn’t it be unwelcome? Look at the whole thing from the perspective of the online contact, or the online friend, who receives such a message of despair. People forget online friends most of the time when they’re happy, and remember them when they are bored and unhappy. When such people are not happy, they run to their computers and start typing messages, vowing to themselves, and their online contacts, that they will keep in touch forever. It raises the hopes of certain online contacts, let us suppose that’s you, the receiver of such messages, that such a friend is not simply a contact, and is in fact a friend who will keep in touch. However, such hopes are quickly shot down by reality, when you realize that your depressed online contact simply came for comfort and sympathy, and when a good therapy solved everything, they changed their nicknames to say “Status : busy” again, just like before. Any chances of you sending a message in response to the original message, expressing their own discomfort or emotion about something, gets shut off even before you start typing such a response.

What do you think about any of this? Here is a closeup of a line of bells hanging. The main emphasis and focus somehow went towards one of the bells in the front, right thread. Imagine you’re one of the bells who gets pulled when someone needs help. After you’ve imagined that, close your eyes for 5 seconds, and then imagine that you’re someone who needs help and pulls one of the bell strings. After you’ve imagined that also, close your eyes for 5 seconds, and simply look at the picture and assume that it’s about bells on strings and forget being associated with it in any manner, since for some people, online contacts are sometimes also good friends and for other people, good friends are sometimes only online contacts. And now, I’m off to eat something. Thank you for reading.