In the past few years online friendship has become really popular among younger people. Almost everyone nowadays has at least one friend they met online. Some people believe that these online connections are not as significant and fulfilling as the ones that people make in real life. I mostly agree with this statement for the reasons I will provide below.
First of all, the majority of people communicate online using texts, so usually the do not see or hear their friends. And sometimes people exchange texts for years without actually seeing each other. Lack of physical touch and visual contact can complicate forming a strong, meaningful bonds. Our brains are made this way, and because of that you can feel lonely even when you chat with your friends online on a regular basis.
Secondly, it takes a lot of effort and work to build a strong relationship with a person. But in online friendships people usually are not eager to work on their problems, because you can just ignore your friends, they cannot do anything to you, you do not feel the same responsibility as in real-life friendships. It is always much easier to find someone else to chat with online than to compromise and work on your problems.
In conclusion, online communication is not a bad or useless thing. For example, it can help you keep in touch with your hometown friends. But it is much harder to form a strong connection with a person without meeting each other face to face at least once.