Anonymous Contribution for Chapter 2: “Online Experience”
These days I tend to get the idea that my journey with social media started in 2014 when I joined Instagram. But in actuality, I was interacting with people via the internet, a long time before that. When I was 12, I was under the impression that I was old enough for an email address and convinced my mom to let my older sister make one for me, under the condition that she would share my password and be able to supervise me and keep tabs on who I was chatting and emailing with. Give me an inch, I'll take a mile. I changed my password within a few weeks, without severe consequences.
Then I joined Buzz, which was Google's social media platform before Google+, and started sharing pictures online. Fun fact, I met my best friend via Buzz. This is one of the few, perhaps even the only relationship in my life that started online and ended well, with us still being best friends today. After Buzz was shut down, Google+ came into the picture, which was my main source of social media up until 2014, where I joined Instagram.
Reflecting now, I think 12 years old was much too young for me to be exposed to the overwhelming thing that is the internet, unsupervised. I had the freedom to talk to almost anyone I wanted to, and I was quite the social butterfly, so I did talk to a huge amount of people. This was a huge part of my life, and I remember every day at school, my classmates would ask me who I chatted with last night, and I would rattle off a list of about eight people. I'm not in regular contact with any of those people today. Which is somewhat normal, I think, because in high school, you have a lot more in common and spend a lot more time with your peers. On IITV, you see them almost every day, and you see them a couple times a school year due to gatherings.
Which brings me to my next point. I truly thought these people with whom I was talking to every day, were my friends, and perhaps they were. But talking to people online is a lot different from talking to people in real life. I would so often run into a situation where, even though I talked to someone, via the internet every day, we would have little to nothing, aside from exchanging pleasantries, to say to each other in real life. And this was not a worst-case scenario. Sometimes we wouldn't even look at each other, and sometimes that was the end of our talking online. You know, you meet this person that you've been talking to online, in real life and can't even say hello, and you realize that what you had isn’t a friendship, it wasn't real. Real life relationships have so many different factors, like eye contact, facial expressions, hand gestures, tone of voice, etc. that are simply not there if you're talking with someone through a computer. You would also never get as personal with someone you're meeting face to face, right away as quickly as we tend to do online. Typing words with our fingers is a lot less intimidating that saying them, and people kind of tend to lose their humanity when they're hundreds of miles away. They are simply another profile photo and words. So sometimes, even though you felt like you really knew someone, you knew their birth date, their likes and dislikes, they had told you stories that had shaped their childhood. You had a lot in common, really. But upon seeing them for the first time in person, neither of you could find a single thing to say to each other. Kinda embarrassing, but unfortunately entirely not uncommon.
My parents grew up with not even having a landline in their house, and them having to navigate parenting a child who has the ability to connect with people around the world on a handheld smartphone would take serious creating of boundaries about something you had no idea about. And yes, boundaries were set but of course I, being a teenager, would always find ways to get around these boundaries. I'm not allowed to be chatting with my friends, but I can watch hockey highlights, right? So I would have two tabs and would be chatting, and whenever my older siblings or parents walked by the computer I would switch over to hockey. I did and said things online I would never do or say today, but I was a kid with my hand in the cookie jar.
Of course, most kids won't know the negative effects the internet can have on them, and I wouldn’t expect them to. I also wouldn’t expect most parents who grew up with little to no technology to know, either.
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Anonymous Contribution for Chapter 2: “Communication”
First and foremost, this is only partly my story. I was the bystander, blind to the truth until it was too late. This is the story of how my negligent towards a person caused them pain and me deep regret and what the importance of proper communication does for a friendship.
Since I was a young girl, I had a friend very dear and close to my heart and though I didn’t see her more than a few times a year, our bond was unbreakable. When she came to visit, our days were spent knee deep in mischief and when she left, early to late evenings were spent chatting on the phone. Whenever she came, she brought along her latest gadget. It seemed as though her parents were constantly supplying her with technology, and this was true. First came the tablet, then it was the iPad, then the iPhone. She had it all, or that’s how I saw it. At times I would find myself fanaticising being her sister and having the same toys she did. What a lucky girl, what nice parents she has. As years passed and we grow, visits were less frequent, but we would always made sure to stay in touch if we couldn’t meet in person.
When I turned fifteen, I got my fist device, an iPhone. One of the first things I did was to join Instagram. I was, above all else, curious/amazed about this Social Media platform where not only could you post pictures about your day, cool things you’ve done or made, but you could also stay connected with all your friends through texting. I had been watching my brother doing it for a long time and I was excited to join the façade. The second reason I joined Instagram was because my long-time friend was on there and I thought how cool it would be to no longer have to call all the time, but we could now text. I think that the above all cool thing about texting was that words could now be well structured and thought together. You could take your time to respond or choose to say nothing at all. Not like in person where talking way unavoidable and abrupted (this comes from a person who finds it challenging to know what the right thing to say is). This rainbows-and-butterflies perspective were my first mistake for I failed to acknowledge the obvious.
So, I started texting with her. At first all seemed normal. I would talk about my day and she’d do the same. As the weeks turned into months, my main source of communication continued to be texting, especially with my friend. Visits went from rare to non-existent and I never felt the need to call her either. Whenever my mom asked me if I felt like a visit, I would throw the offer aside, sometimes because I had too much work and other times for no reason at all. I suppose I thought that there would be nothing to talk about since we were in near constant communication with one another. Whatever needed to be said could be done over text. One day in late spring, my mom had gotten a call. She talked for a long time and afterwards she called me into her office. I noticed a down casted face as she asked me if I was in contact with that friend and if I knew how she was doing. I told her that we talked often and how she seemed fine to me. My mom then said that she had just talked with my friends’ mother who told her that my friend wasn’t doing good at all. She was failing classes in school and spent most of her time locked away in her room. Her mom was scarred that her daughter was becoming depressed.
I had no idea. She had seemed fine last we spoke. But then I realized that we hadn’t really spoken in a long time. How could I have known how she was actually feeling. Messages were like:
Me: Hi, what’s up.
Her: Not much, just hanging out Me: Cool, I gotta run, ttyl
Her: k, bye
A week later we took a drive to her house. I felt anxious, knowing that there was something going on in her life and I had not given her the chance to confined in me. When we sat down together, I knew there was something different about her. She was distant and sad and nothing like the bubbly girl I have known her as. It took a few hours and I did learn partly what had been going on. She wouldn’t tell me everything though which I believe to be my fault because I hadn’t given her much of a chance to trust in me.
Now, I am adamant to get our friendship back on track. It is a long process that takes patients and time. I want to be the person she can turn to with her problems and not just the picture and text bubble. Texting is emotionless, and therefore a bad way to stay connected. Feelings can’t be exchanged the same way. I had been unfair to my friend. I was limiting her to the social media version of me. I wasn’t being a proper friend at the time when she needed one most.
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