Is it Possible to find True Friendship Online (Essay Sample)

Student’s name
Instructor
Course
Date
Social Media: Is it Possible to find True Friendship Online?
True friendship is established when we get people so close to us that we can share our trust, obligations and our lives with them. They provide emotional, psychological and physical support. We reach out to them in time of needs. A genuine and lasting friendship requires time and effort. We put efforts to nurture, nourish and maintain the real friendships. It is this voluntarily acts of kindness that makes friendship precious and rewarding. However, such friendships cannot be established on social media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Google Talk.
It is inevitable that we will step on our friends toe at one time or another. What happens when we post a twit or a comment that hurts our social media friends? The truth is that when offends or discomforts our social media friends we part ways. They may opt to play passive aggression towards us. Alternatively, they will often give a cold shoulder to any post or comments that we make. When true friends disagree on an issue, they address the issue and forgive each other (Rebecca and Nigel 1). The caring feelings portrayed in accepting and forgiving eventually establishes trust and intimacy. This is a real friendship.
Genuine friends are there for each other when it matters most. We could be having thousands of friends on social media. But how many of these are there in times of need? How many can we count on in the hour of need (Meyer 14)? When we post our genuine problems to our social media friends, the only sensible responses that we may receive back comes from our real friends, those that we physically know, and they are using social media. Quality friendships matter the most in times of need than having a lot of friends (Meyer 14). Even when things are not working very well with our families, we turn to our true friends who are always there to offer their shoulders for us to lean on. They listen to our problems, help us where they can hence they are a source of personal growth and enrichment (Meyer 11).
Online friendship contributes to loneliness and inadequacy. Sometimes we want to get our friends chatting, and we make posts. Unfortunately, they fail to respond. The worst of it all is that we can see a green dot on our screen next to their names demonstrating that they are online too. We feel sad, lonely and neglected. We feel that we have lost touch with our friends. Most probably, these are the people we have met once, or we included them in our lists of acquaintances because they are friends to our friends. It is pointless to have...