Back in ‘99,
somewhere between playing dolls and torturing my 4 year old sister, I
discovered the Internet. I don’t remember much about my first experiences but a
few nostalgic things come to mind….
• AOL
Kids Only (and all the fun games and restrictions it came with)
• CHAT
ROOMS
• AOL
Instant Messenger (A/S/L?)
• The
sweet sound of dial-up
• “You’ve
Got Mail”
• And
my mom kicking me off line to use the phone :(
I remember I loved
chat rooms and talking to complete strangers… (If only I knew then, what I know
now) …but you chose a chat room to go into by picking a category of discussion.
Today, my favorite
communication tool on the Internet is Twitter. If you compare Twitter to chat
rooms, it’s not all that different. On Twitter you can follow different topics
and persons of interest and ‘join the conversation’.
(And thanks to
Chris Hansen and the folks at NBC Dateline: To Catch a Predator, you don’t see
as many creepy online predators anymore)
It’d be hard to get
by in today’s society without some sort of Internet access. We’re always
checking our e-mails, Facebook, Twitter accounts etc. It makes communicating
with people easy and fast. Instead of calling each other 500 times in one day,
my family and friends can plan out trips in one big chain email. I can find
someone from class on Facebook and ask them about our homework. Then, I can go
on Wikipedia and find the answers to that homework. (Just kidding.)
I know it might
sound bad, but I hear about most of the news via Twitter. But it’s convenient
to follow the sources that I want to and I already am checking my Twitter feed
almost at all times.
I’ll never
forget, back in 2009 when Twitter was still pretty new, I was out with my mom
and I got a Tweet from CNN Breaking News announcing the death of Michael Jackson.
My mom, who is beyond obsessed with Michael Jackson, (she wore a single white
glove to her high school graduation… enough said) didn’t believe me when I told
her that I saw it on “Twitter” and she just kind of blew it off.
My mom is the type
of adult (and we all know one) who thinks she is too good for social
media. She would always say she’d never get a Facebook. Well, guess what? She
has one now. She doesn’t use it to post pictures and statuses and reconnect
with old friends though. She uses it to enter contests and sweepstakes.
I know what
you’re thinking.
BUT she’s actually
won a lot of cool things with contests on the Internet! Including an
all-inclusive trip to Disney.
It’s hard to
imagine a world without all the possibilities brought to us by the Internet and
quite frankly, I’m a little bit glad that I never really had to.
So many creepy people are still on the Internet; they’ve just gotten better at what they do. Thinking back to all those times that I was on the Internet dealing with people like that, you’re so right that it wasn’t safe. I don’t honestly think that any of us knew how dangerous it actually were to be in those chat rooms! Your connection of twitter being similar to chat rooms makes a lot of sense. I would have never thought to make that connection at all. How you were able to point out the power of twitter, by using the Michael Jackson story about his death, was great (even the part about your mom was funny). To simply put it this was a great article.
ReplyDeleteYou have a style of writing that is fascinating. Reading this, I found myself laughing a lot. You have a great way of connecting with you audience on a personal level, which seems to be difficult sometimes with social media. I think that your stories are very well centered on the subject about your first time, though you might not remember your first time using the Internet. You did a really great job with this, I think.
A lot of the users of Internet in the 90’s vividly remember the dial-up connections. Katie recalls her mother kicking her off of dial-up so that she can use the phone line, I having this same memory. I’m remembering the squeaking sounds of the connection being completed in my ears as we speak. Chat rooms were very popular at this time, especially group chats. Towards the beginning of the millennium lots of young kids shied away from house phone usage, and turned to chat rooms for what they may have thought was more privacy. Katie talks about her mom’s views on social media, which is a nice comparison to our generation. Some mom’s in our generation are not on social sites, but with the increase of popularity their usage has also increased. The only difference I noticed in opinion manner was the appreciation of growing up in the heart of the technology era. I find that the Internet causes people to become lazy. A lot of current Internet users are too comfortable with other people finding out information for them; as sad as it is I am one of them. I would like to have had the chance to experience things without having the comfort of the information being at my fingertips. I thought is post was great in style and entertaining in context.
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