Can you learn social skills online?

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Can you go to a chat channel and start increasing your "conversational social skills", and then that experience can be reliably transferred to real life? Or do you also need to perfect your "conversational behaviors" in real life before the transformation can be completed?

Let's assume the person in question isn't someone with Aspergers, but is rather a secluded introvert whose presumably "severely lacking" in social skills due to lack of practice.

Or possibly a secluded introvert with severe verbal memory deficits.

Of course, you can consider the typical AS individual as well.

When you're talking to someone on the internet, it's a completely different experience as you don't have the chance to interpret their body language, facial expressions, ect.. To answer your question, it may help a little (in terms of choosing words, and coming up with answers) but not very much overall. Video chatting may be a little better, but still lacks most of the same elements.

I feel that although I didn't learn social skills from the internet, per se, I did learn about how other people my age thought when I spent hours on forums and AIM (when I was 12-15). It didn't help with nonverbal communication, but it gave me the confidence I needed to initiate conversations with NTs and the experience with how people answer each other on forums helped me learn when it was appropriate to join a conversation.

Then I got actual practice with social skills in real life as a result. =D

I'd say reading and studying social skills online, but never practicing them in real life, would be like studying how to play an instrument, but never actually playing one.

Applying these skills online can be either sufficient or insufficient. If what you're after is to improve your online social skills, then by all means, that is the way to do it. However, if you're looking to improve your real world social skills, it would be best to practice in the real world.

I think that it would be a good place to start. You are still interacting with other humans and it can help build the skills and confidence that when the person is ready, could be gradually tested in face to face meetings.

I have learned a bit by posting online, but there is still a deficiency in my face-to-face skill.

What posting online has taught me, although I have not yet mastered the lessons completely:

1. The value of I-statements as opposed to you-statements. It cannot be emphasized enough, in my opinion, that talking about my own feelings and perceptions, as opposed to telling the other person what he/she is doing or should do, makes a huge difference in how my posts are received by others.
2. That what I think is people being rude to me, could well be a figment of my imagination. If I read someone's written words two different ways, the same words can take on different meanings and prompt two opposite reactions in me. This even applied when I asked etiquette expert Emily Post a question, and received an e-mail back from her. At first I read her response as snippy and condescending, and I thought, "What a stuck-up....." but when I changed the internal "tone of voice" and read her answer back to myself in a different way, it didn't sound like that at all.
3. To stay on topic. I am at high risk for "going off on a tangent," as my mother calls it.
4. Not to say *everything* that is on my mind. If I do, the post becomes far too long and unreadable. (Like this one?)
5. That I tend to communicate better in writing than I do verbally, but I sort of already knew that. Before the internet, I wrote people notes to voice my feelings, because I couldn't put them into spoken words.

What posting online cannot teach me:

1. Eye contact, gestures and other body language, or appropriate vs. inappropriate touch.
2. To overlook things that offend me. I have never learned how to "let it roll off my back" or "just ignore it" or "don't let it bother me," as I have always been advised.
3. To work or play well with others. I tend to move slowly, which frustrates others. Even worse than the "come on, move it" comments I get verbally, I've even had people push me out of the way, or grab my work out of my hands to do it themselves, because I'm too slow. Which leads to:
4. To overcome that feeling of injustice when *they* get to be rude, and it's OK, but *I* have to watch my every step or else all hell breaks loose.
5. Perhaps most frustrating at all, how to fit in when there are already established cliques.

When I first discovered chat rooms back in the mid 1990s, I remember that I actually socialized a lot better in chat rooms than IRL. I don't do chat rooms anymore but still participate in forums such as this one. I say there was definitely a transfer of skills because I went from completely friendless in high school (pre internet) to having a moderate social life in my early 20s (after discovering the internet). Of course it helps that college students are a lot less cliquish than high school students and I find the adult world more tolerate of quirky people than teenagers but I think I also learned some social rules through chat rooms and it was easier to focus on the rules of conversation in chat rooms as it is to both verbal and nonverbal communication which is required IRL.

Allie Kat
http://www.myaspergerslifestory.com/