Pathology of cyber friendship in Iranian Weblogs

Abstract

Although Internet and virtual world have provided formerly non-existent chance for Iranian youth, Internet pathology has been paid less attention. Present research, applying critical procedure to cyber friendship and liquid love, tries to analyze this phenomenon among Iranian youth from different aspects. The research applying a qualitative procedure that is content analysis, has collected and analyzed the issues relevant to cyber friendship on weblogs of Iranian bloggers. Collected issues have been categorized and analyzed by qualitative method and finally regarding collected issues, researchers have done analysis and made some predictions. Research results suggest that most Iranian youth have negative attitude toward cyber friendship. Their most important reason for criticizing this type of friendship is that it can be harmful and deceptive. Cyber friendship has lots of supporters in Iran. Nevertheless, it has more opponents among Internet users, specially bloggers. Also, reviewing the bloggers, negative narration of this kind of friendship shows that most of them have had positive attitude toward cyber friendship in the past.