Can meeting friends on the internet be a positive thing?

In today’s world the Internet is as common as water. Rare is the moment when a phone can’t be pulled out to answer a question. People are constantly updating their social media feeds or playing games on their devices. How does this connectivity change the way we communicate with friends, strangers and relatives? Are people still wary of hanging out with people they meet online or has chilling with strangers become a new social norm?

When kids are younger it seems the message, “be wary of people you meet over the internet” is ingrained into their heads, but it seems that internet friends can be a positive thing.

Ninth grader Sienna Axe, who is no stranger to stranger danger, talks about her take on internet friends. “They are nice because if you’re going through a transition in your life and you don’t have friends, you have Internet friends that you are not going to move away from because you were never there in the first place,” Axe said.

Through the internet, ninth grader Sophia Beaufrand has been exposed to all sorts of different people.

“I think that the internet has really opened my eyes and has been a form of a wakeup call to other cultures and other people’s situations,” Beaufrand said.

Instead of simply telling kids not to talk to strangers online, it might be more valuable to teach them how to make positive choices in internet friends.

Director of Academic Technology Jeff Tillinghast feels that telling kids once will not teach them a valuable lesson.

“It’s something you have to continually revisit. When you’re a younger kid it’s a lot easier to draw lines and say, ‘this is black and this is white.’ There is a huge need for the conversation to be constant,” Tillinghast said.

As teens get older the way they interact with others changes.

“When I was younger I posted a picture of Dean Winchester from “Supernatural” and someone commented, ‘Dean is gross, One Direction forever’. Then there was this full-on war, but it was all pretty harmless because it was ‘this person vs. this person’, but now it’s more me vs. you,” Axe said.

Even though there are occasional arguments, Axe feels that cyberbullying is not really an issue.

“If someone says something that’s completely uncalled for you just unfollow them,” Axe said. “If you want to get cyber bullied go on Club Penguin because seven year olds are terrifying.”

How did internet friends become so prevalent?

“There has been a lot of research on how kids now don’t have the same idea of physically going to a place. The stereotype for us when we were kids was we are just going to hang out at the mall,” Tillinghast said. “Just going and hanging out at the mall is not as big now as it was when I was a kid. So what’s replaced that? If you can’t just go and hang out with your friends, you want to hang out somewhere with people and online has filled that space.”
by: Lila Luthy