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Social media, in some form or fashion (not necessarily equitable to today’s standards), has been a part of my life for quite a long time. I feel fortunate enough that I didn’t grow up on social media like today’s generation is, during this current era of egregious privacy violations and emotional manipulation that seems to pervade every form of social media today (more on this in a future blog post). But I did grow up with technology and experienced first-hand the creation, evolution, and eventual fall (and rise again..?) of social media.
I’ll begin by revisiting one of the earliest memories I can recall. The year was probably around 1999. Mom had just bought our first desktop computer via mail-order catalog (think analog version of Amazon, for those privileged enough to have never had to order from a catalog). The machine Mom chose was a Gateway, and it shipped in a box covered in a black-and-white cow print pattern, like so:
This was Gateway’s signature look of the 90’s and early 2000’s. Anyone who saw the cow pattern knew instantly which brand it was. Gateway was a stiff competitor with Dell, both offering affordable, highly-customizable systems.
As for the computer itself, it was a slim, upright desktop PC with a removable plastic face plate that I would frequently snap off and on when I was bored (we didn’t have fidget spinners back then). I remember the spring-backed power button being so satisfyingly squishy. The machine ran Windows 98 (Second Edition I bet, because the computer had USB ports which weren’t natively supported in Windows 98’s first edition) and it looked similar to this:
Side note: speaking of Windows, my favorite memory of Windows 98 was the Disk Defragmenter utility!
ASMR wasn’t a concept then, but looking back, watching the visual defrag animation was so incredibly peaceful and soothing to me. I would just sit and stare at it, and if you dared so much as wiggle the mouse the process would start all over again. But watching the flashing bits and boxes reinforced the feeling that no matter how messed up things in life got, you could always push the defrag button and watch everything fall back into place. Kinda like how with a wave of his wand, Dumbledore reset the Muggle house where Horace Slughorn was hiding out in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:
Anyways, I’m getting off track here. Back to my initial point of this post… This was the computer where I first encountered The Internet. My first experiences online were over America Online’s dial-up internet service, which came with a certain number of minutes per month (yes children, internet usage used to be metered by the minute! And speaking of minutes, don’t even get me started on the concept of Rollover Minutes!). Unlimited internet didn’t come until years later, and if mom needed to use the telephone you had to log out. We streamed our funny videos in potato-quality 64p resolution (a whopping 128 by 64 pixels) and we liked it. This little box was revolutionary at the time, and my whole family spent hours exploring the possibilities that computers and internet offered.
ANYWAYS! I, again, digress. (Side note, if you’re going to read my blogs, just a fair warning: I meander a lot, sorry! Zander Meanders, whaddayagonnadoaboutit.)
So, this is the computer where, and the time period when, I first signed up for an online game called Neopets. Neopets was all the rage because you could “grow” cutesy lil dragon animals. It was like a computer version of the Tamagotchi, or in my case the Gigapet, and was created during the height of the virtual-pet toy fad. The game had puzzles, challenges, daily quests, and other tasks and missions that kept 6yr old me busy. Looking back, Neopets took huge inspiration from Pokémon with regards to the creatures you could concoct. You could even name your pets and give them a personality! Neopets was also remarkable in that it featured a limited social aspect where you could create a “profile” with a “username” and could join chatrooms with other players.
I don’t remember all of what happened in these chats, but mostly players were focused on exchanging creatures, trading power-ups, or buying and selling other in-game commodities. There were some times where a player wasn’t honest and would scam me and other players, taking my currency but not delivering the agreed-upon item. Nevertheless, the more you played the game, the more you came to recognize the usernames of your fellow players, and the more you recognized who was a trustworthy player and who was not.
Some years later, in a sad turn of events, the family computer was sold at a yard sale but sadly was not replaced, due to major financial challenges doled to my family, which I don’t plan to detail here. In short, after losing the Gateway computer to a neighbor via yard sale, I spent the next subsequent years without a computer, without access to the internet (all my Neopets subsequently died from starvation), and without any regard to how the internet was growing and changing during that time.
That is, until approximately the year 2006, when I was reacquainted with the internet! I will tell the second half of this internet journey in a subsequent blog. But for now, you have reached the end of my first blog, and in the words of Windows 98's shutdown screen*...
It’s now safe to turn off your computer.
*(Fun fact: Windows 2000 and XP were based on the NT kernel and revolutionized the ACPI standard, making it possible for the operating system to physically power off the computer. Prior to then, Windows could shut itself down but could not turn off the computer. Thus, you were presented with the above screen letting you know when it was safe to switch the computer's power off. Ah, how times have changed...).
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