After a significant portion of my life spent online, I have kind of come to the conclusion that typing to other people is, in a lot of ways, a fundamentally different experience than talking to them.
It fills the same emotional needs just enough to make it hard to get up off your ass and put the effort into going out and finding people with common interests and making friends with some of them, but it does not provide anywhere near a full emotional diet.
I agree with you, but I also think it's worth pointing out that I feel like the inverse is also true.
'Typing to people' is different to talking to them, but it has its own very real and rich reward, that I feel is different to but overlaps with talking.
That overlap means that yes, sometimes my need for connection with other people can be sustained entirely by typing, but not forever.
Along the same lines, I do not get exactly the same reward from talking to people as I do typing, and I find that after several days without spending some time thinking and typing to other people, I itch to get back and just have a back and forth about something online.
Usually, I prefer this to be something that I and the person I'm talking to agree on, and we're plumbing the depths of shared experience, but sometimes to much chagrin it definitely is 'beef'.
Sometimes I wonder if this is because the sort of people I type to online are very different to most of the people I talk to offline, but I don't honestly think that explains the whole thing.
I would agree with you, with the caveat that I think that I would much rather live without typing to people online if I had to choose one or the other.
Typing is great, theres a certain density of information and shorthand inherent in how we write and use punctuation (much like how a lot can be said with gestures and facial features) as well as a sort of shared purpose (we all came to this website to have a particular kind of experience, everyone present is in a particular sort of mood)
It fills the same emotional needs just enough to make it hard to get up off your ass and put the effort into going out and finding people with common interests and making friends with some of them, but it does not provide anywhere near a full emotional diet.