Do you really need online friends?
The advent of Social Networking Service (SNS), represented by Facebook, has changed the world so much that the figure of the society without SNS is even impossible to imagine. Social Networking Service is an internet-based communicating space where users can make their offline relationships online. The impact of SNS on modern society is incalculable. You can know every day life of a person who lives in the opposite side of the Earth, share photos of you and your friends, and conduct political activities in order to fulfill one’s political goal by just surfing through SNS websites. Police officers are using Facebook as a tool to put a guard on potential criminals, trace evidence, and inform public about certain crimes such as kidnapping, terrorist attacks and burglary. Yet, the most important role of SNS is to connect people online. 600million Facebook users can find their friends on Facebook and add them as their friends. Since Facebook provides its users with friend connecting technology which uses a person’s individual information to identify his or her friend, you can find your friends by simply putting some of your personal information, such as your occupation, age, sex, and your personal interests.
Even though the friend relationship on Facebook is based on offline relationship, you can make an online friend relationship with a person about whom you don’t know anything. While surfing in Facebook, you might have a chance to add a person who you think is interesting or fascinating as you friend by just looking at his or her profile picture and reading personal information. Making such relationship can be an entertaining thing to do, but it may end up so awkward that you might think that it would have been better not doing so. Your friend in Facebook may not be a person who you think to be, because, what you see about him is what he intends others to look at him, and that’s something you do, too.
In the movie, The Catfish, the protagonist, Nev Schulman, becomes a friend with an 8-year-old girl named Abby Pierce, who is incredibly good at drawing. The relationship started when a parcel of the picture of one of Nev’s photo arrived in Nev’s office. Nev and Abby became Facebook friends and the friendship has broadened to Abby’s family. As time goes by, Nev became so friendly with Abby’s family that he felt that Abby’s sister Megan fell in love with him. However, Nev and his brother Ariel, and his friend Jooke found out that something was strange about Abby’s family. The song that Abby send him, which she said she has recorded, was actually an MP3 file of a Youtube video, and Abby’s family has never allowed him to talk to Abby on the phone, saying that Abby is sick, or is playing with her friend. In order to reveal the truth, the three guys went to Abby’s home. Surprisingly, there was a family in which there were a father, a mother, who looked far different from her profile photo on Facebook, and two handicapped sons, who have never appeared on Facebook, and Abby was not even good at drawing something. This happening was a very intricate and weird plan of Angela, the mother of Abby, who loved drawing and wanted to make friends with others. She made several Facebook accounts in order to compose a family and used others’ photos to replace her own, somewhat, bad appearance.
You might think that the situation happened in the movie may be a super exceptional one. I understand that you might find it so difficult to accept the reality, but reality is reality that you can’t stop from encountering it by just trying to not admit it. At first, I also thought that the movie is depicting a very rare situation; however, it wasn’t that rare. One day, one of my friends contacted me by MSN, and told me that she is worried about her younger brother. What she told me was that she thinks that her brother has a fake Facebook account and made friend with some foreigners whom he has never met. As you can see, people are faking their identity in online spaces and pretending to be more handsome, cool and attractive. The reason of doing so is simple; they are not satisfied by themselves. Because they find themselves inferior to people who they admire, such as famous celebrities, athletes, or movie stars, they want to be like them at least on the internet.
The wave of social networking service became something modern people can’t avoid. You might not be able to live a life without Facebook account near in the future. The pivot of economy, culture, and politics would shift from offline places to online websites. Your personal relationships will be stored in Facebook, and you might have to keep in touch with your friends regularly, for you might not be able to meet them face by face. You might feel happy by making friends online, for you feel that you come to know more and more people. However, there’s one thing that you should never forget. Keep in mind that your real friend is not your friends in the internet, but friends who you are with now.
