The Lost Teens Of The Internet

There was once a time when not fitting in with your classmates meant that you were almost entirely alone. School was really the only way to meet kids your own age unless you made friends through your parent's friends or extracurriculars outside of the school walls. The reputation you established amongst the kids you go to school with would be the reputation you would carry with you until college unless you move to a new town. Alienating yourself from your peers would mean many Saturday nights alone in your room.

But weep no more, lonely ones! The teens of the modern world have the amazing Al Gore box to facilitate their need for human interaction. Social media websites are some of the most popular on the internet losing only in popularity to I'd guess porn sites (not fact based). While there are websites that are more tailored to interacting with just people you know, like Facebook, there are many sites that allow you to interact with anyone you can find like Twitter or Tumblr. Also, there are plenty of more specific sites where people get acquainted with each other based on shared interests like Deviantart, sites were you can post your writing, and forums for anything you could imagine.

Now, everyone has heard the online horror stories (I don't have any personal ones to share) and, to a lesser extent, the success stories. One of my best friends made a friend through a sports blog and developed a full friendship with a girl she met once at a skating competition years ago by keeping in touch online. I also have a friend who met his wife through a mutual friend and spent years talking to her online because they lived in different countries before moving to America and marrying her. As you get older, making actual friends online is not as scary as it used to be when you were told in fourth grade that everyone is secretly a child molester. Websites like Myspace and then Facebook have made telling the truth about yourself online more common while at the same time all the excessive warnings about the internet have made us more cautious.

Whether or not making friends online is a good thing is up to debate of course because what I actually want to talk about is the reasons why people make friends online based on my own experiences with the "kids of Twitter." I will use three examples and, for the reference, two of them are now friends of mine so if they object to me using their stories, I will have to take them down.

First let me give a quick back-story of how I met these people. Back in April of 2011 I was out of college and barely employed so I decided that I needed something to occupy my time so I made a Twitter account to post things about the comic/show "Fullmetal Alchemist" and the fandom surrounding it. As a result, I picked up a lot of followers who were interested in the show and a lot of people who had Twitters based on roleplaying the characters from the show who all knew each other from the roleplay (also known as RP).

 BOY A

Boy A was an RPer, the oldest of the group, who initially talked to me using his RP account, making comments on my tweets from the character's perspective. After a short time he switched over to his RL/RP (real life/roleplay) account and started talking to me as himself. At first he thought I was male because I spoke in a gender neutral manner but I corrected him (this is important). We started talking a lot on Twitter and switched to AIM and later Skype and I learned why he started RPing and found out a lot about the reputation he had developed online. His best friend moved before their last year of high school and for a while he was alone. This lead to him spending more time online and eventually creating an RP account to make funny comments, leading to him getting pulled into the RP group. Aside from this RP persona, he developed what a lot of internet kids end up developing: "a real life persona".

Online, "RL" is supposed stand for "real life", the opposite of "RP." It is supposed to be you as you actually are away from the internet. However, many of these people actually develop three levels of reality: "RP/roleplay" which is entirely fictitious, "real life" which is who they actually are offline, and something we (me and Boy A) have come to refer to as "RL", a fictitious version of themselves as how they want to be perceived online. RL usually has some basis in truth but it is without limits and is often standing in for an aspect of real life that the person is lacking.

Boy A's RL functioned to make up for his lack of experience with women. While he eventually made new friends at his school, being naturally shy and going to a single sex school meant that his interactions and experience with girls his own age were extremely limited. His reputation online became that of the pervert. Unless a girl was much younger than him, he would often try to "cyber" (look it up) with any girl he talked to, the anonymous nature of the internet allowing him to be tactless and in control of his interactions with girls in a way he couldn't be in real life. He also participated in two roleplays (one as a fictional RP and one as an RL roleplay) of relationships. As expected, this got him into trouble, once when he mistook a relationship roleplay for actual feelings and, even worse, when someone developed actual feelings for him and he had no idea how to deal with it, hurting her deeply.

I managed to avoid this treatment from Boy A for quite a while, most likely because he initially thought I was a guy and his mentality towards me had not yet changed. After he saw a picture of me however, I got the same treatment as the other girls but instead of indulging him (the sad response) or running from him (the sane response), my amatuer psychologist instinct took over and I tried to fix him. Ultimately he did change, abandoning RP and RL entirely and developing real life normal relationships with girls but only after he had a destructive experience where his RL persona and real life collided.

GIRL B 

Girl B is a case of someone who roleplayed but who never developed an RL persona. She is only ever herself or a character.

I don't know the full story of how she started roleplaying but I do know that she roleplayed with an original character for a while before abandoning RP to only speak as herself on her personal Twitter. The reason for her being online is also directly tied to why she eventually stopped RPing. A lot of kids start RPing 1.) to meet people with shared interests or 2.) to escape from the reality of their own lives. On the first point, in the case of Girl B, she had spent her entire life moving from place to place so she had a hard time maintaining close friends and through the RP she was able to meet people who she would never move away from and to have a sense of community. On the second point, Girl B was going through depression brought on by severe family troubles and her lack of close friendships and RP could partially help her escape.

Eventually however, her depression took hold so firmly that she could not mentally escape it and instead she finds people online to talk to about it. Tumblr in particular has a large community of teenagers with depression and eating disorders who constantly try to give each other hope when they have lost it themselves. The problem is that she encounters many caring strangers who want to help her but later decide they can't handle her burden and abandon her.

I don't know what her future holds or if she can escape this but I think college will be the answer for her, specifically a college far from her troubles where she can live permanently for four years and meet entirely new people in real life while keeping the online friends who are actually her friends.

GIRL C

Girl C is probably exactly the kind of person you think of when you think of kids looking for friends online. She is young, homeschooled for conservative and religious reasons, and naive. Her outlook on the world is so sheltered and unlike the usual bitter teenager's interpretation as she has never had to face the hardships associated with peers. She tweets from the second she wakes up to the second she goes to bed. Her world exists online and, in particular, in the RL. I have no idea if she has any real life friends; the only one she mentions is a neighbor who she dragged onto Twitter with her. I do know that she does have extracurricular activities but, aside from that, she never seems to leave her house unless it is with her parents.

I said that RL always serves a function of making up for something lacking in one's real life. For Girl C, RL makes up for everything. She "real life roleplays" everything: playing outside (ironic), hanging out with friends, marriage, raising children/family, relationships, etc. The fact that I know so little about her real life social life is ultimately false. Her whole social life is online in a series of roleplays where she is a version of herself, interacting with versions of other people.

As of now, she probably has the most destructively relationship with the internet. It allows her to interact but it keeps her from forming a real life. One has to wonder if she even tries to make good friends in her extracurriculars. She probably believes that she has everything she could want already in her virtual world.


So is internet social interaction a good thing or a bad thing? I personally think based on the stories above that it is good if done in small doses. It is important to have a real social life and to not replace it or aspects of it with a virtual world, but you really can make valuable friends online.

The most important thing though in my personal opinion is to come as you are. You don't need roleplay or an RL persona.

If you want to pretend to be a character, write a first person perspective fanfiction.

If you want to talk to people, be yourself.