Q&A: How social media made me hate my best friend
We all know that highschool is a big, overdramatic popularity contest consisting of catty girls who over-obsess about their Instagram accounts and testosterone-filled boys. High school is a sensitive time when teens are figuring out who they are and who they want to be, and a time when friendships and romantic relationships fluctuate, especially in such a social media based society.
The end of high school wasn’t easy for Christina Smart, now a senior studying Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University. Christina grew up in a small town in Nebraska and attended a highschool of about 400 students, graduating with only 108 students. During her senior year of high school, a fight caused by social media sparked the end of the friendship between her and one of her very best friends. I sat down with Christina on Wednesday to re-hash the fight that caused the split.
Q: Firstly, what caused the fight between you and your former best friend?
A: Well, freshman year (of highschool) I became best friends with this guy named James. About the beginning of sophomore year, James started dating Hayley, who eventually also became my best friend. To make a long story short, Hayley and James broke up a few months before senior prom. My boyfriend at the time got a concussion before prom and couldn’t go. So, James and I talked about going to the dance together, since he was single, my boyfriend couldn’t go, and we were still really great friends. The next day at school, he made a poster asking me to prom and we posted it on social media, like all highschoolers do. And that’s kind of, like, how it all started.
Q: Did you talk to Hayley about the situation before you and James decided to go to prom together?
A: Yes, and that’s why the situation was so complicated. I told her James and I had been friends for so long that we could go to prom together as friends and have a good time. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about it, but she never said it was “off limits” until I posted it online.
Q: Why did posting it online escalate such a big fight?
A: I’m not sure. It was so weird like… once I posted it on Twitter and all our friends saw it, I think she got embarrassed and thought we were trying to humiliate her or something. She started like telling people things about me that I trusted her to keep personal, and she was always “sub-tweeting” me. She ignored me at school and blocked me on all social media. She still has me blocked to this day which makes it even more ridiculous. Like it was 3 years ago, get over it!
Q: Do you think social media had a direct effect on your relationship with Hayley?
A: Honestly yeah. Instagram was still pretty new when I was in high school and people always wanted likes and followers, and I think when she saw me getting attention because of the prom post with her ex boyfriend it kind of made her more pissed about the whole situation. Looking back, it’s really stupid that a single picture I posted on Instagram and Twitter caused the end of our friendship.
In an article written by Alex Pattakos called “The Meaning of Friendship in a Social Networked World,” he describes what the true meaning of friendship is, given some help from the philosopher Aristotle. In a movie titled “The Social Network” the tagline is “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.” Throughout the article, Pattakos talks about what truely determines a friendship, and how the internet cannot be relied on for managing a true friendship. Only face to face interactions can bring about the authentic trust and reliablity of a friend. Ultimately, In Christina’s case, the relationship that was built between her and Hayley clearly was not strong enough to withstand the pressures of social media.
In an article by Psychology Today, Facebook and other social media sites can cause extreme jelousy. This example, aimed more specifically to romantic relationships, can also easily be applied to friendships much like Christina and Hayley’s. The post that Christina made to her social media sparked jealousy, which led to the end of their friendship. Checking up on family, friends, and significant others’ accounts can more easily create that sense of jealousy. According to Psychology Today, “Facebook creates a negative feedback loop in which potential jealousy-provoking information leads to more partner surveillance on Facebook, which, in turn, increases the chance of experiencing more Facebook-related jealousy.”
Similarly, Teen Vogue magazine ran a study on drama and jealousy that is caused due to social media, and the findings were quite eye-opening. “Sadly, 21% report feeling worse about their own life because of what they see from other friends on social media,” and “68% of teen social media users (52% of all teens) say they’ve experienced drama among their friends on sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc. And 26% of all teens have had a conflict with a friend over something that happened online or over text messages,” much like the case, unfortunately, with Christina and Hayley.
