Growing Up Online

So, I have a bit of a girl crush on Emma Gannon which I don’t think will come as a surprise if you follow my Twitter. I first came across her blog in November last year when she wrote a piece in response to Essena O’Neill quitting the internet with a cry of SOCIAL MEDIA ISNT REAL! I have been obsessed ever since. I love Emma’s blog, her weekly newsletter and her podcast – she has a really accessible way of putting her points across and I love her attitude to the online world. Her blog post The Anti-Bucket List in December inspired my now monthly posts of the same name and her encouragement to put your work out there has changed the way I think about blowing my own trumpet.

Anyway, enough fangirling, now to the matter at hand: Emma has written a book and I loved it. Ctrl Alt Delete is her memoir of growing up alongside the internet and is the perfect mix of hilarious social media faux pas and more serious topics such as body image, relationships and feminism. It’s great (and you should buy it).

Reading Emma’s book was like a trip down memory lane and I got a little nostalgic about noughties dial up. Emma is five years older than me but her experiences are very #relatable and so I’ve been reminiscing recently about my early memories of the internet and I how I dived nose-first, ungracefully into social media.

NEOPETS

I had all but forgotten about Neopia and its residents until I saw someone mention it on Twitter the other day and I was suddenly transported into a world of faeries, omelettes, potions and soup kitchens (nineties kid, you get me). I was Neopets ob-sessed and I think it was probably the first website I was ever hooked on. It was across between a tamagotchi and THE INTERNET and it made me feel all kinds of responsible. I would care for these things, hunt for food for them, play games to earn vital funds and gamble their lives on the daily Wheel of Fortune. It was brilliant.

I’m amazed to discover that Neopets is still live and kicking, having assumed it has died a death years ago like so many other early sites. The yellow starred sidebar looks exactly the same and it pleases me enormously that the same crappy logo remains. I’ve long forgotten my login details so I can’t go back into the site, but it’s probably a good thing – my pets haven’t been fed in ten years, it would be too sad a sight.

I do wonder what the Neopets community looks like now, and if it is still thriving. According to wiki, Neopet users in 2003 spent an average of almost five hours a month on the site. That is nothing to today’s standards but when all that’s coming out of your mum’s phone bill, you should count yourself lucky. I always felt safe on Neopets but I wonder if the same could be said now, with an avid user being able to spend A LOT more time online than the preteens of 2003. Gambling (albeit it with Neopoints) and chatting with strangers while being low key advertised to by the world’s biggest brands? All part of the fun, and it was fun. I made my mum sign a parental permission form which we sent in by FAX (lololol) to let me access areas restricted to under 13s. I was hardcore.

 MSN

@ sum point in ma preteenz sum1 decided it woz kool 2 tlk lyk dis, nd so we all did 4 a prtty long tym. I do not know why, it was as though we had spent our whole lives learning to use correct spelling and grammar, then started to rebel this system as soon as we got into secondary school. The internet had something to do with it I’m sure, it always did. And the breeding ground for this strange form of language? MSN messenger. 

I’ve been trying to work out a timeline of my online history and I’m fairly sure that MSN came after my Neopets days but before any real social networks. I remember being sat around my table in my year 6 classroom, summer 2006, and the girl opposite me were talking about this new MSN thing they were using. I had vaguely heard my older sisters mention it but I didn’t know what it was (ditto Facebook a few years later). This girl on my table was pretty cool and we weren’t exactly friends but I remember her slipping me her Hotmail address on a piece of paper and going home that night to set up my own (I was fairy_princess2410, an address I won’t forget easily).

It was a weird time because not everyone had computer access at home, it was still very much one huge desktop PC for the whole family, and, being only 11, not everyone’s parents let them use the internet freely. It was less a case of “talking to my friends” on MSN and more of “talking to any acquaintances from school I could find with an account”. We’d chat endlessly online after school because it was fun and exciting, but less so on the playground the next day. 

My contact list (and emoticon collection) grew over the next few years as we headed into the teenage and got the hang of online etiquette more, but the talking-online-but-awkward-face-to-face thing stuck around and always has with me. Whether it be a best friend, a boy I liked, or someone I was just getting to know, I soon found that it was much easier to say things (and hide!) from behind a keyboard. It’s an idea we’re all familiar with now, but I think it was MSN that first taught me how easy it is for someone, myself included, to be not quite genuine, to put on a front, or feign confidence. A valuable lesson it was too.

BEBO

I was never much of a Myspace kid but Bebo was my JAM. It was my first social network and I found it (a) super cool to have an online space of my own, and (b) amazing that I was on ~the internet~ You could log onto the internet anywhere in the world and I was on it. Me. It was like being on the telly or in the paper. Bebo was my online home in the early years of secondary school before I made the move to Facebook at the end of year 8 – soz Bebo. I spent hours on it after school (we had broadband by then so I could browse to my heart’s content) and I would be sure to “share the luv” everyday with my allocated allowance of three hearts.

What I loved about Bebo was the customisation options. 16 friends would show up on your page in a 4x4 grid, so picking and ranking was hard. What I loved to do was become “friends” with arrow profiles – accounts that set their profile image as a pointing arrow with the words “BFF” or “luv her” or “my wifey” underneath. Slotting these into you friend grid was the ultimate compliment. And there’s nothing that says “Bebo” more than skins, the backgrounds we could put on our pages. I soon learned that you could custom make your own and so, with the help of a 30 day free Photoshop trial and a dodgy tutorial, a new hobby was born. I made them for myself, I made them for friends, I had requests from girls in the year below. I was cool, I could make skins. (My favourite was a bright yellow and pink one with the words “If you can read this you’re upside down” rotated 180° on the top banner – hilarious). At the time it was just something fun that got me a bit of attention and cool points but now I realise that it was one of the first times I used the internet to teach myself a skill. My parents and teachers didn’t show me how. I started to self-teach web design and coding at the age of 12 which is pretty cool. Thanks Bebo.

Bebo was also the first time I could cyberstalk, not just my friends and boys from school but real people in the real world. One time that sticks in my mind was when I (obviously) typed my own name into the search bar and found, to my amazement, that ANOTHER Georgia Stephenson born in the same week as me was living in Australia. I was shocked. This is it, I thought, my chance. After being politely rejected by my attempted penfriend in South Africa I had visions of a new international buddy, it was like The Parent Trap. But, alas, Australian me did not respond to the paragraph I wrote on her wall. Shame. I wonder what she’s doing now. I wonder what Bebo’s doing now. Apparently it’s relaunched as a strange messenger app and I’ve missed my chance of reclaiming my archived profile but never mind Bebo, you live 4eva in my heart.

BLOGGING

Does anyone else remember Piczo? I hadn’t thought about it for years but it’s just popped into my head. I guess it was my first taste of blogging before I really knew what it was. Piczo was my own website with its own domain (I think?) and it was a space I could write things and post them. Granted, they weren’t very insightful things at the age of 12 and my interest in that particular site didn’t last very long, put the idea was there.

I’ve been writing on this blog for over a year now and I’ve mostly been really happy with what I’ve posted and my consistency, but this is by no means my first blog. I’ve had a couple of short-lived ones but my first real blogging project was in 2009, it was oh-so-dramatically called “One Day My Heart Will Sing”, and it was my online diary for a year. I posted every single day for a whole year, and do you know how many people read it in that year? Zero. Because no one knew it was there.

I don’t really know what I was hoping to get out of the project because I was disappointed that nobody was reading while also being terrified that someone I knew in real life would find it. I don’t think there was anything incriminating (it’s been safely wiped from the web now) but it was probably for the best that no one read it – it was a heap of boring crap. I was conflicted between wanting to be public and private, like so many of us are online, but it gave me a chance to get used to the blogging format and how the site worked, so for that I am grateful.

 I’ve learnt so much from the internet. My early years online were formative and my browsing habits are continuing to develop. When people tut and frown at me using my phone what I don’t think they realise is that I’m learning. I’m reading articles and posts, expanding my mind and vocabulary, being exposed to ideas and cultures that aren’t my own. I’m talking to people and discussing ideas and arguments, just like I did in the early days on Facebook (though my opinions have come a long way since then). Social media’s not just about reading what Susan had for lunch, there’s a lot more to it than that.