The Platform That Raised Me

I did not grow up online in the way that gets talked about now, with the algorithmic feeds and the constant optimization for outrage. I grew up online in an earlier, messier version—forums, fan sites, the particular intimacy of finding people who were interested in exactly the thing you were interested in, in a family and a town where nobody else was. I was eleven when I made my first account on a forum for people who liked a specific book series. I am thirty-one now. I have spent roughly two-thirds of my life with an active online social presence of some kind. What I want to talk about is what I got from that, what it cost me, and what I would tell a younger version of myself if I could.

What I Got

I got a sense that the world was larger than the county I lived in. I got access to people who read differently, thought differently, organized their lives according to values I had not seen modeled in person. I got my first exposure to political ideas I had not encountered at home—some of them bad and eventually discarded, some of them shaping how I still think. I got my first experience of writing for an audience and having the audience respond. None of this was available to me in the three-dimensional world I actually inhabited. The internet was not a supplement to social life for me. It was, for several years, the primary location of my intellectual and emotional development. A study from the Oxford Internet Institute found that for adolescents who reported lower levels of offline social connection, online social interaction was associated with positive developmental outcomes including sense of belonging and identity exploration—outcomes that were not well-predicted by the amount of time online but by the quality and reciprocity of the interactions. I was not just consuming. I was in conversation.

The Part I Got Wrong

I learned to be articulate in text before I learned to be present in person. This sounds like a small thing. It was not. I developed a version of myself online that was more confident and more interesting than the version that existed in physical space, and for a long time I treated the online version as the real one and the physical version as a draft. This created problems. I was better at making connections across long distances than across short ones. I was better at writing something than at saying it out loud. I could hold a thread of conversation for days over message and lose it entirely in the same room. I have spent most of my twenties closing this gap. Not abandoning the skills I developed but learning to translate them, to bring the person I could be in text into the same rooms as my actual body.

The Tangent About Parasocial Relationships

I want to talk for a moment about something I spent years not having the language for. I grew up investing genuine emotional energy in people I had never met and would never meet—writers, musicians, the people running online communities I was part of. Some of this was normal cultural participation. Some of it was something more like a substitute for the reciprocal relationships I was not developing offline. Parasocial relationships are not pathological by definition. But I notice, looking back, that the periods when they were most intense were also the periods when I was most isolated. The investment in a one-way relationship was proportional to the unavailability of two-way ones. Nobody told me to notice this or what to do about it.

What I Would Tell the Eleven-Year-Old

Use it. The internet will give you things you need and would not have found otherwise. Let it be what it actually is: a tool for reaching beyond your immediate geography, for finding people who care about what you care about, for practicing being yourself in a lower-stakes environment. But do not let it become the only place where you feel real. The skills you build online are transferable but they require translation work you cannot skip. The person you are becoming in those forums and chats still has to learn how to exist in a room. Research from Stanford's Social Media Lab following teenagers across a ten-year period found that those who integrated online connection with continued investment in face-to-face skills reported higher wellbeing outcomes in adulthood than those who substituted one for the other in either direction. The both/and, in other words, was the better outcome—but it required intention. It did not happen automatically. Your offline life will require the same practice the online one does. It will be harder because there is no backspace and no time to draft your response. Do it anyway. The person you are online is worth introducing to the people in the room.