Online interactions are something very unique that hasn't really existed in the past. Even just chatting with customer support, if you choose to ask a mildly personal question and they respond, that's as good as the positive body signals that I'm so bad at interpreting in real life conversations.  On this chat, I sympathized very much with the person who has to live in Buffalo and has vacationed in the Finger Lakes.  It was pretty amusing that he thought I was older than I was (I guess for cable your birth date's not in the file), since he was talking about rabbit ears and Gilligan's Island as if I'd been around when they were in vogue, but that's the protection of anonymity.

Despite small lies on those topics, it was just...nice.  To talk to a stranger and being able to see what will appear on the screen instead of blurting out inappropriate things.  To think that hopefully I made his shift less onerous.  To know there basically are no repercussions if I say something wrong; he can just let the chat idle instead of replying.

Anonymity on some level really takes away some of the stress I have interacting with the real world.  It's not healthy and not something I want to do often since it is avoiding my own anxieties and problems.  But I can see where for someone who doesn't understand the pitfalls of this situation, particularly teenagers who feel they don't relate to their peers, it can be seductive. 

No matter what, any semi-long term online contact should at some point go to IRL.  Otherwise you're tiptoeing around the edge of life all together, and the internet has enabled that to an unprecedented degree.  It's a brave new world.