well i would but im a trifle confused about what your asking here....

In my opinion there are clear divides between artificial subcultures on the internet and subcultures created by face to face human interaction. online personalities and therefore any collection of personalties are moulded by the intentions of the contributors, i.e the subculture is based purely on intentions, truthful or not, thus rendering the culture void of any validity. when individual are held to account for their beliefs a true culture/sub culture can be formed.

it has to be said that although i do worry about who im *really* talking to on forums n stuff, i am actually probably too trusting and i think it is possible to form relationships with people online (not romantic, but friendish)

that's partly what i'm asking you to do.

It's so much easier to find people with similar preoccupations on the net than it is in real life. Just type depressed+bisexual+teenage+goth into Google. and there you have your new group of acquaintances. And because it's so easy, you end up with different sets of people to discuss different things with. You can talk about your bisexual tendencies and eating disorders with your suicidal goth 'friends', and your love of Coronation Street on some Coronation Street website somewhere, and thus you never get beneath the surface of most of the people you meet. Everyone's reduced to a set of matching characteristics, because they air their unmatching laundry elsewhere.

Whereas in real life, you'd discuss things with (a) group(s) of friends made in more normal circumstances. You'll bond with people over one issue, but discuss other things. Sometimes they're people you meet at gigs or whatever, so you know you've got something in common, but just as often they're people who get on the school bus at the same stop as you, or work at the desk next to you. Life throws people together in a far more random way than the internet. although it's still very easy to find suicidal teen goths if you're into that sort of thing.

It's like the difference between using a dating agency and approaching someone you fancy in a pub.

There are a lot of fora which delve much deeper than that. Here, for example, we're all kinda bonded by a love of music. But there are more and more posts about non-music related issues - look at the recent spate of threads about being dumped. But even bearing that in mind, there are people here I've been communicating with for years and I wouldn't say I knew them by any stretch of the imagination. But I do know some of their interests/ideas to an extent.

N.