Growing up with social media, we are taught about all of the dangers. We were incessantly told: “Don’t talk to strangers," “Be careful what you post," and “It never goes away after you put it on the internet.”
I don't think that adults fully understood the positive sides to interacting on social media when we were young. It takes approximately 2.45 seconds to send an instant message on Twitter, while it takes eight hours to travel by plane from London to New York. The two have seemingly no correlation. Thanks to the internet, that changed for me on February 16th, 2015. That was the day I met my best friend.
On October 23rd of 2015, I was scrolling down my Twitter timeline when I got a notification that a girl had messaged me privately. When I opened the message I realized I was placed in a group chat with myself and 5 other girls, none of whom I knew. The first girl to speak was named Rianna. She said that she had found all of our Twitter accounts funny and wanted us to all talk to one another because we would be great friends. When I clicked on her profile her location read “Nottingham, England.” At this point I didn't understand the concept of being friends with someone online, how could you possibly get to know someone that lived an ocean away? Flash forward two months and me, Rianna, and another girl named Emily were inseparably close. We spoke everyday about music, movies, things we hated, things we loved, our family, our friends and everything in between. Whether it be through a text message or on a FaceTime call, we always found means of communication, and loopholes to the time difference. The two became such important people in my life, that I found myself staying in on a Friday night just to speak with them on the phone.
After months of becoming such good friends, Rianna texted me and asked “Approximately how far do you live from Time Square?”
She proceeded to tell me that she would be coming to New York on a school trip in February, and I would be able to go see her in the city. The morning of February 16th, I took to Central Park and wound up meeting her. We spent all day walking around the city and got lunch at 7/11, because she found it fascinating and they don't have them in England. As our day came to an end, I realized how amazing it was that I was able to meet her.
Growing up in a town with a population of only 16,000, I didn't think much about how many other people there were in the world. Social media helps us correct that mindset. Rianna, a total stranger from a country thousands of miles away, became one of my best friends in such a short amount of time. It’s hard to believe that if I didn't have social media, I would be missing such a major part of my life.
Rianna, Emily and I have grown so close that I have set up a trip this coming April to London. There, I’ll not only reunite with Rianna, but meet Emily for the first time.
Through websites like Twitter, I am able to communicate and interact with so many people I would have otherwise never gotten the chance to. I would have never guessed growing up that social media would have any sort of impact on my life that wasn't harmful and I feel truly blessed to have been able to be proven wrong.
I owe a great deal of thanks to social media for helping open my eyes to how big the world truly is. There are so many different and diverse people out there that I would have never been able to know it if it wasn't for websites like Twitter.
I have made friendships with people that allow me to travel across the world and have interacted with all types of people from all different cultures and nationalities. I am eternally grateful for the friends I have made in Rianna and Emily and for everything social media has done to allow that.
