'I'm Petting the Laptop, Which Has You Inside It': Reflecting on Lived Experiences of Online Friendship

Online(-only) friendships have become increasingly common in daily lives post-COVID despite debates around their mental health benefits and equivalence to "real" relationships. Previous research has reflected a need to understand how online friends engage beyond individual platforms, and the lack of platform-agnostic inquiry limits our ability to fully understand the dynamics of online friendship. We employed an activitygrounded analysis of 25 interviews on lived experiences of close online friendship spanning multiple years. Our findings present unique challenges and strategies in online friendships, such as stigma from real-life circles, an ambivalent relationship with online communities, and counter-theoretical reappropriations of communication technology. This study contributes to HCI research in online communities and social interface design by refocusing prior impressions of strong vs. weak-ties in online social spaces and foregrounding time-stable interactions in design for relationship maintenance through technology. Our work also promotes critical reflection on biased perspectives towards technology-mediated practices and consideration of online friends as an invisible marginalized community.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; HCI theory, concepts and models; Empirical studies in HCI.