Casey Walsh ’14
\nEE Staff Writer<\/p>\n
Even back in the days of MySpace, everyone has always headed caution towards making friends on the Internet and on social media sites. We\u2019ve all been to assemblies in school in which an adult comes in and talks about how they thought they were becoming friends with a 20 year old girl named Brittany from New York when it was really Mark, a 50 year old man from New Jersey. But despite all of the negativity given towards making friends online, I personally believe that there is a positive side to making friends online if you go about it the right way.<\/p>\n
Many people have found their best friends in the \u201cfan world\u201d of Twitter and Tumblr. Trumbull High senior Krissy Szabo met her best friend, Iman, through Tumblr (a blogging website where you can post pictures of things you like or pictures that relate to your life). \u201cI had posted something that was like \u2018follow me on Twitter and I\u2019ll follow you back\u2019 and she followed me because of that,\u201d Szabo remarks, \u201cwe ended up retweeting each other a lot and that\u2019s what sort of started the friendship.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to get a little bit scared because people always used to joke around telling me \u2018oh she\u2019s totally catfishing you!\u2019 but I never believed them.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cCatfishing\u201d is a term that comes from the show Catfish<\/i> on MTV. According to urbandictionary.com, a catfish is \u201ca person who pretends to be someone they’re not using Facebook or other social media to create false identities.\u201d That is the most common fear in making friends on the Internet.<\/p>\n
After talking on Twitter for a few months, the two exchanged Snapchat users as the true test of a fraud. Snapchat is an app in which you \u201csnap\u201d a picture or video of yourself and send it to your friends for up to 10 seconds. As soon as Iman snapchatted Krissy back and she saw the same face that was in her picture on Twitter, she knew that Iman was indeed who she said she was. Krissy and Iman have been friends for two years now and are meeting in person January 18th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n The fan world of Twitter has aided in the creation of many friendships that are stronger than any in-school friendships I have ever seen. Millions of girls all over the world come together because they are a fan of the same thing: One Direction. I know it may seem bizarre to some people that five boys can connect girls from all around the world and build unbreakable friendships, but it happens every day. I have personally made three of my best friends on Twitter. Mollie from North Carolina, Pauline from Canada, and Karla from Mexico. They have been better friends to me than some of the friends I\u2019ve known for my entire life. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how many times that one of my online friends has helped me get through something more than a physical friend has,\u201d says Mollie, \u201cOnline friends also give you hope that one day, you\u2019ll meet them and be able to thank them for all of the times they were there for you.\u201d Mollie and I became friends because she sent me a direct message on Twitter saying hi and asking me how my day was going and now four months later, we are the best of friends. We have so much in common and we talk every day, as if we go to the same school.<\/p>\n Online friends are truly the best friends you\u2019ll ever have. \u201cPeople online are truly amazing because they take you for who you are,\u201d Pauline says, \u201cThey genuinely like you for you and that\u2019s a great feeling.\u201d But as always, you need to be careful at first with your online friends. Talk to them for a while and really get to know the person, there\u2019s nothing wrong with that and don\u2019t give out too much personal information right away. Online friends are always painted in such a negative light, I think it\u2019s high time the positive side is shown as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Casey Walsh ’14 EE Staff Writer Even back in the days of MySpace, everyone has always headed caution towards making friends on the Internet and on social media sites. We\u2019ve all been…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2009"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2095,"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2009\/revisions\/2095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}