"To Catch A Predator" Is Not Real Life (or, How Internet Friends Are Indeed "Real" Friends)

When I was a kid, I was allotted one hour a day of computer activity. Oh, you read right: one hour. Those were the days when school assignments did not require a computer to be done (oh, what simpler times they were. I actually remember a time before Google. The computers at school’s default search engine was Ask Geeves. I mean who the hell is gonna trust a search engine that sounds like it was named after a butler? Everyone knows it’s always the butler that did it. Who’s gonna trust a murderer, am I right?). I mostly used that hour to play the Sims (the first one, I’m that old) and sneak onto MSN Messenger (like Facebook Messenger, but way cooler. Who remembers the giant annoying buzzing animations?), which was, when I was in elementary school, forbidden. I never knew the exact reason why my parents did not want me going on MSN Messenger as a kid, but I assumed that it was because they thought that’s where the predators were.

My parents are not like most: they both have degrees in Computer Science, and have pretty much always known more about computers than I do. Growing up in the beginnings of the Internet Age made my situation relatively unique amongst my peers; even in high school, most of my friends were vastly more technologically savvy than their parents. And this was before the emergence of the smart phone (I knew one person in high school who had an iPhone; all my friends’ cell phones had real keyboards and were often *gasp* flip phones). 

I truly “discovered” the internet when I got my first laptop. I bought it at the end of the summer of 2007, after working my very first job at a reception hall, waiting and cleaning tables for weddings. Some time after that, I discovered the wonderful world of FanFiction, where I reignited the love of writing I had developed in Mrs. Krupp’s sixth grade English class. I mainly wrote fics for Bones and Hannah Montana (if you want to mock me for the latter, please see my previous post. I’ll wait. Oh, feel silly now, do yah? Good.), but read fics for pretty much all my favourite fandoms. Then I discovered YouTube.

ENOUGH BACKSTORY: ON TO THE MR. FEENY-STYLE LESSON!

YouTube was what my Advanced Fiction Workshop professor would call my “crisis”: the event that breaks the main character(s) away from their normal lives and starts the story. My teenage years, as explained in my last post, were a very dark time for me. It was on YouTube, making fan videos and discussing my favourite shows with complete strangers, that I found my solace from the darkness of my everyday life. These complete strangers, however, quickly became my closest friends.

For someone who lives more in “real life” than on the internet, it’s hard to explain how people from different time zones, countries or even continents could be considered my friends. It’s not that I didn’t have friends at school. I had a sufficient amount of school chums. But there was something very freeing about the virtual world: while these people were flesh and blood humans somewhere else, I didn’t have to deal with looking into their eyes when I talked to them. And strangely, that lack of physical presence gave me a lot more confidence to be myself. 

I once told my best friend that I felt more comfortable talking to my internet friends about certain things than I did with her. Years later, I found out that it had genuinely hurt her that I had felt that way. It occurred to me recently how truly hurtful that was to say to someone who didn’t understand my point of view. I loved my best friend, and still do, but she has always been an incredibly social person who has never had any trouble making friends or engaging in conversations with total strangers. (Example: when we went to Orlando for my 21^st birthday, I lost sight of her in a Starbucks, only to turn around to find her chatting with probably the only French-speaking person in the entire mall. That’s the kind of person she is.) I have always been uncomfortable around people. I often say: I don’t make friends, friends make me. I also have always had trouble with words (in the talking sense, obviously not in the writing sense *pats self on back*).  Telling my best friend that I would rather talk to whom she deemed to be complete strangers was, and remains, a really shitty thing to say. Even though at the time, it was the honest truth.

VIRTUAL PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE TOO

The term “real life” is thrown around a lot in contrast when talking about the Internet world. This has always driven me bonkers. The people I talked to on the Internet were just as real as I was: they had faces and hair and insecurities and homework and feet and all that good stuff. They too had problems with talking to people “in real life”. And no, while I have not met most of them in the flesh, that does not lessen their impact on my life. They were an audience for my thoughts and feelings, as well as for my creativity. My internet peeps were my first ever audience for my writing. Until I started university and was basically forced to let other people read my stories, I couldn’t bear the very thought of it. I wrote a story for a school project in college and had to literally leave the house when I finally let my mom read it. I owe what shred of self-confidence I had as a teenager to that wonderful online community of friends. We shared common interests without the fear of ridicule. 

One of my best friends, Vickie, and I on our first vacation together (Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic). We met first on Twitter five years ago. Guess what? She has (so far) shown no signs of being a sexual predator and/or not a "real" person.

GOOD NEWS: NO ONE HAS YET TO TURN OUT TO BE A PREDATOR

Now, I’m sure there’s a whole subset of the internet that is riddled with sexual predators (I’ve seen that episode of Law & Order: SVU), but maybe it’s ‘cause I’m too old for them now, but I’ve yet to “befriend” any of them. While it’s a valid fear for parents to have, I think it’s no longer the primary problem that their kids might face on the internet. I was raised in a time where internet was new and unknown to a lot of people, and Dateline NBC and America’s Most Wanted showed us a pretty ugly side of this new-fangled thingamajig called the World Wide Web. Nowadays (God, I’m making myself sound so old), everyone from a very young age has internet access at their fingertips. The concept of “cyber bullying” did not exist during my childhood, and now it’s a major problem in schools across the world. The anonymity of the web can be used in a really, truly cruel way.

But guess what? It can also be a really, truly awesome thing.

I have gone shopping and gone to the movies with my internet friends. I have gone to dinner and to concerts and even gone on vacation with my internet friends. I have crossed the border to have a sleepover with my internet friends, and spent a wonderful weekend playing video games and telling my internet friends’ parents all about being Canadian. I have gone to my internet friends’ school plays and had them sleep over at my house. I’ve even accidentally set up my internet friends with my school friends. They are real people to me, and not for a second did I ever doubt that they were, and still are, a part of my real life. They impacted my real life in a real way, and that feels pretty damn real to me.