If you accidentally make eye contact with me on the paths, you’ll know what I mean when I say my awkward, forced smile makes me look constipated. I’m not good with greetings. I either over-do or under-do the amount of energy I put into a conversation. I don’t understand all the unspoken rules to communication, with all its intricacies and nuances.
I feel awkward in social situations. Before coming to Andover, I spent three years with virtually no interaction with the world outside my home. It started when the pandemic hit, and a year after, I transferred to a school with a community built brick-by-brick on a virtual platform. I found a home there: friends I adored, memories I treasured, and a sense of belonging.
So when I sat in the first ASM of the year, being told about the artificiality of social media and online networking, I felt an unsettling weight in my chest. It was meant to be an encouraging message, advising us to live in reality and enjoy the physicality of social relationships, but it annoyed me. It felt dismissive of the personal relationships that I’ve built through the same virtual spaces that were being condemned. At the same time, I found myself agreeing with some of the criticism too. Even so, I had a gnawing feeling that what was said wasn’t the whole truth. How are the friends we make in person any better than those online? Now that our lives are so intricately intertwined with technology, are these two worlds as different as they seem?
I agree that much of social media is a performance. We curate our carousel of Instagram photos that capture us at our best angle, our best moments. We pretend that our life is more put-together than it actually is by simply not showing the messy parts. But the same thing occurs in reality — do we not play a similar facade around people we are unfamiliar with, deny access to our vulnerable, ugly parts in order to protect our image? I would even argue that most of the of things we do are for performance; it just depends on how much authenticity we inject into it.
Face-to-face interactions can be suffocating because of this. When I came to Andover, I didn’t expect the whiplash I got from its overwhelmingly active social life. The environment was the direct opposite of what I was used to. I was immersed in its community 24/7, with no way to shut it off. Sure, unavoidably seeing these people every day can be seen as an incentive to solve personal conflicts, but it also puts pressure on us to be agreeable, to maintain good relationships with people we aren’t close too, and too much of that pressure leads us down the same downward spiral that social media does: faking a persona to be liked.
Whether online or in-person, there will always be people who are more open about themselves than others. Some may feel more comfortable with one method of networking than another. Both mediums are valid in their own right and provide different advantages and disadvantages, with their own nuances. Internet lingo has also been adapted to indicate tone and intention, by using extra letters at the end of words, punctuation, caps lock, and emojis. The main difference is the lack of physical connection in a virtual relationship.
Online friendships do not diminish the value of in-person interactions; if anything, it makes me treasure them even more. My online friends and I can’t touch, feel, or share our love for each other in physical ways regularly, so we must use quality to make up for quantity. One thing that stays constant is the excitement that builds months before our meet-ups. There’s something vulnerable about meeting in-person that always provides a new layer of connection that you can have with someone, to ground us in a reality and see each other as a tangible manifestation of their online persona.
The discussion around technology and media does not end here: we now live in the midst of phone bans and other attempts to disconnect us from a virtual society. It is easy to get lost in the technological world and forget its purpose and all its advantages. Social networking allows us to connect with people in so many different ways from all over the world, something that is important to acknowledge at a school that prides itself in diversity. Now that we’ve advanced so far into a technological age, let us move on from the once internet-free life and use technology to build authentic relationships, all the while understanding its potential harms.
