Online Trust

When you meet someone online and you get to know them, it's very hard to determine their depth of feeling.  By this is mean the extent to which they actually care about you.  Now it's easy to be consumed by cynicism and say that nobody online really cares about you and write everyone off, but speaking from experience that is not strictly true.  Even beyond the people who have cared about me there are people I care about who I've never actually met.  That's a strange concept to me because I'm from that awkward in between generation that experienced life with and life without the Internet whereas those before and after lived without it and with it respectively. 

For those who lived without the Internet, the same apprehension exists when thinking about friendships and relationships in general that we form online.  Trust is something that is not easily placed.  On the other side those that have only lived with the Internet there as a higher level of comfort and greater degree of normality in building a friendship with someone you have never and may never actually meet.

We live in a modern world and our complex communication networks make it a very small place.  Being thousands of miles away isn't the barrier it once was.  No the main barrier in online communication isn't distance anymore it's the lack of physical presence.  The lack of unconscious communication.  Body language etc.  I have said before in other posts with myself as an example and my relationship with you my readers, that you only know what I choose to tell you, and the only things which are communicated are what I choose to communicate and what you can infer from that.  We don't consciously hide things but we make no conscious effort to hide them either when it comes to our faults, our insecurities, or simply the things about ourselves that we just don't like.  Case in point your profile picture will reflect what you are comfortable sharing and mask anything you are not.  That comprehensive review we carry out in such a short period of time after we take a selfie to decide whether or not to delete it is a highly compressed example of this thought process and behavioural pattern.

As a result of this the impressions we perceive, the opinions we build, and the conclusions we draw often end up being misinformed, or outright uninformed.  The things which in person may be blatantly obvious we can end up being completely oblivious to online.  The point of all this is to bring back the focus onto the question, how do you tell how genuine someone is being and determine the depths of their feelings?