The cyber life of an ordinary girl called Tamara

First of all I want to introduce to you a girl who I met , her name is Tamara she is an ordinary teenager, as any common one. Tamara is a shy girl, who loves going on the internet every single day, and today is not the exception.
Tuesday, 4 p.m Tamara entered silently to her mom`s bedroom when she was lying in bed trying to take a nap.Tamara touched her arm and said: Mom, mom could you lend me some money please?. Oh tamara what do you need the money for don’t you see that I’m trying to sleep”.” I know tamara said”, but I need to go to the cyber to do my history homework,it is urgent ” okey but, if you want to go to the cyber you must tidy your room, why? Tamara asked, and her mom answered because I said so. Okey , okey I will, Tamara went to tidy her bedroom, and in effect she has a messy. Fifteen minutes later Tamara entered to her mom’s bedroom again, and said I have finished. That`s good, now you can go to the cyber, here you go, and please arrive home early and remember not chat with strangers .”okey mom I will take care and see you later”.
Tamara left the house and her mother couldn`t take her nap because she was worried.

Tamara entered to the cyber and use the same computer as always, but if you think that she is doing her homework you are completely wrong, because; she is chatting . Tamara is a shy girl and is not talkative at all. I work at church as a youth leader, therefore I have spent a lot of time with her not only at church but chatting to her on msn, in which she is talkative, this is why it is important to metion the different behaviors that she has at church and when she is in the cyber. As I mentioned before Tamara at church is not talkative, in other words, she is very shy, and it`s difficult to keep a conversation to her, because when you talk to her, she always smiles and says isolated words such; as yes or no, maybe, I dont know etc... On the contrary to her behaviour on msn, she always starts to talk to me, and if I don’t answer immediately she starts to insist on talking, she always says hello, how are you doing?, how was your day? What are you doing, ANSWER to me!. Sometimes I get dizzy, because she talks to me a lot, I mean I want to say stop talking for a while. I already have talked with some of her friends and they are impressed about her behavior on the internet and they say: we can’t belive it she is like another girl. In fact , they have the reason because her personality changes a lot on msn, because everybody in the real world knows about her shyness, but on Internet there are people that don't know anything about it.

For those reasons, it is important to know how important these cyber friends in Tamara`s world are . When I have talked to Tamara she has told me that she hasn’t got many friends at high school; she feels excluded by her peers, because she is not as attractive and outgoing as her classmates. Teenagers are always trying to define and redefine themselves in relationship to others, and they do not want to be associated with anyone having unacceptable or unattractive characteristics. They try to strengthen their own identities by excluding those who are not like themselves, this is why Tamara finds refuge on the internet staying away from the real world because is in that place nobody knows anything about her personally, and nobody can judges her because of her appearance and her shyness, the internet is the place where she feels secure and more comfortable, furthermore she feels accepted by others, but she doesn’t have to forget that she lives in a real world.

As a matter of fact, Tamara has a confusion between the fiction and the reality because she thinks that she is only accepted and listened by others on msn, and maybe something like that can not occur in the real world , this is why she
spends hours huddled over a computer, there is a good chance you have something to worry about — internet addiction, that means an excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. when i asked Tamara what is she doing on the internet,she always answers me” i’m chatting”, instead of searching for the information for her homework, because it is supposed that this is the reason why she goes to the cyber everyday.Being addicted to the internet is a result of a feeling of loneliness , because many teenagers spend most of their day alone in their homes connected to the internet, while their parents are working. In this case Tamara is not the exception, because her mother works hard all day long,and Tamara after high school stays with her grandmother and that is the time that she takes to go on the internet for satisfying her feelings of loneliness sharing and chatting with her cyber friends in the world wide web.

It is important to mention that for Tamara being on the internet and cyber friends are very important, but they don’t know that they are exposed to people that may have bad intentions ,This is despite the fact that a chat room is anonymous, and all the weaknesses of human beings can be played out inside it without any restrictions, including psychopaths. Some months ago my cousin and a friend of her were chatting on msn, when a man started to talk to them , that man started to tell them things that cannot be reproduced, when my aunt walked into the living room and heard about that conversation, she got angry with my cousin and her friend and punished them, my cousin`s friend was the guilty one, and it wasn`t the first time that she had been exposed to that kind of conversations. This is a practice widely used today by psychopaths, who are masquerading as teenagers trying to catch their attention with a hidden intentions Thank God that Tamara has not gone through this situation but but she will have to be alert and before any sign of a stranger must talk with her parents and remove the contact from her list.

Nowadays we are living in a technological world, in which we are connected with people all over the world with only one click, and that affect especially teenagers, who often spend hours and hours in front of computer. The Internet is very important for tamara`s life because this is the place, in which she is accepted by her cyber friends in the world wide web, but at the same time is a problem because she lives in a real world and she has not realised that there are people who love her the way she is.

Now is 6:00 P.m the session on the cyber has finished, Tamara has to go home, now is the real world in front of her, that world that she has to face over and over again at the same hour of the day, and now she is expecting the following day in which her life has sense at 4:00 P.M.

by Carolina M.