‘I’m Petting the Laptop, Which Has You Inside It’: Reflecting on Lived Experiences of Online Friendship
Published in The 2025 CSCW Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2025
Recommended citation: Yong, S., Milton, A., Suma Rosenberg, E., Chancellor, S., & Yarosh, S. (2025). " " I'm Petting the Laptop, Which Has You Inside It ": Reflecting on Lived Experiences of Online Friendship." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
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 activity-grounded 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.