Detail from Oskar Kokoschka’s portrait of Lotte Franzos
When did you first go online? How did you access it? What was it like? Where did you go? What were your early experiences on the Internet like? How did the Internet change your ideas about the self and the way you relate to others?
My first internet experiences were in 1993, when everything was pretty much still text-based: Usenet, Lynx browser, mailing lists, library catalogs and databases. Using these did not change any ideas I had about the self; I don't recall anything I read or interacted with that was about gender. However, I so much enjoyed using these amazing tools to find information that I decided to become a librarian.
I loved the text based interface. LOVED IT. It was so enraging when everyone peed their panties over Apple with all their cutesy little icons and then PCs had to follow suit.
Weird thing is, I'm an illustrator. But my hatred of stupid icons is never ending.
My first internet experience was looking up "sex change surgeries" in 1996 on my new boyfriend's computer (I didn't have one, being a newly realized trans widow and living below the poverty line) because the husband I was separated from for over a year was going to Stanford University medical to have the full menu of the surgeries. I now advocate for the right of women like me to have swift annulments in these circumstances. Neddy told me he'd be away for 5 weeks and come back "a woman," and I owed him 5 weeks straight with our 5 and 8 year old after that. This means he took off 10 weeks from work for the surgeries and recovery. Much to my surprise, the "vaginoplasty" details were easy to find online. The "dilation" in the post surgery life was detailed, the fragility of the body and need to avoid heavy lifting was all in there. I refused to take this risk of our sons with him 24/7 in his immediate post op phase, and he began all sorts of accusations, initiating the period of defamation on by him of me, continuing to this day. A window into that experience:
I was at UC Santa Cruz in 1982 using the first online discussion boards. Only students from that one university could participate. Even then, in that small group, men punished any hint of feminism. I chose a non-gendered handle but as soon as they suspected I was a woman, that same thing that happens now happened then.
Men hate women. They let us know that over and over, for my entire life, in all media. This latest ideology of gendered souls is more of the same.
My first online experiences were also when it was text based in the mid-late 90s, message boards, email lists. I was around 20 at the time, and at university. I first got into alt.magick - paganism, magic, it was kind of forbidden content, and hard to access any information in my small town. Not long after that I got into Otherkin - people who believe they are either reincarnated from another world, or are "walk-ins" (have been taken over by other entitites, usually from another world or dimension. I was an "elf" - most people were elves, but there were fae and dragons and gnomes and satyrs. We all felt like we were "different" to everyone else we interacted with. Many otherkin would catch up with others at ren faires. Some even glued their ear tips together to try get them to stay in points. It's so embarrassing now to think about. I only told one or two people in real life, and I'm so glad I didn't tell everyone else. The beliefs just kinda faded away when I got busy with life and work, there was never any distinct finish to the thoughts.
I also thought gay men were hot (there were very few depictions of gay men in media or real life then - My Own Private Idaho was the hottest thing ever to my sheltered mind) - today I'd be told that was because I was really a man.
Sound kinda familiar?
I am 100% certain I would have transed if I were a kid today.
I had to have been around 9 or 10. AOL - my parents had the Kids Only restriction on. I remember being extremely jealous of my classmates who could just open a browser and get to anything they wanted. Most of my time was spent on the Pokémon message boards and attempting to get into the Kids Only chat rooms. They were constantly full and you could only get in if your attempt was synced with someone leaving at the exact same time. I obviously became a passionate AIM partisan (RIP).
And sorry, to answer your last question. I definitely think it affected me. I became an internet addict during a time when internet addicts were still rare. I became consumed by internet friendships to the point where I neglected my real life in favor of staying up all night chatting with these disembodied people, many of whom were grown adults. I thought people around the world were so much more important than me and my life in Oklahoma (as I grow older, so does my love and appreciation for home). I had this sort of intense friendship with a 24 year old woman when I was 16 or so, and she would mail me gifts and the like. I never considered the appropriateness of it or whatever. Then one day she suddenly dropped me and I felt like the world was ending.
When I went away to college, I got back in touch with the real world and greatly enjoyed my experience. But there was always this sense of shame I had about having been so utterly “online” during a time when that wasn’t a thing, or at least wasn’t described that way. I would pretend to be surprised at various internet things my friends would show me.
I was born in 1995. I got unsupervised (but limited) access to computer with internet in 2005. I was using computer mostly to play video games and write stories in Word. I knew very few sites on the internet, but one of them was auction platform, so I was just searching for nice items or toys at cheap prices. Other than that I was googling: about my fav tv series, about pokemon, about game Diablo 2 I played with my mom at the time, random facts, music videos. On the sites owned by media companies and dedicated to kids there were dressup games, so I was searching for more dressup games (eventually encountered site with social media features and got immersed in that community, but I was 12/13 then?). As 10 y/o I developed wild interest in politics, so I was reading news online too, tho preferred paper version of newspaper which was always in our house. I collected fantasy themed pictures and was googling that. Major change happened in 2007, when we were taught in school how to set up our own blogs and search for other blogs in that service, I sank deep into that and soon become very online person, tho my early blogs were hot garbage fuelled by childish fascination with blog design.
However, growing up, the worst thing was being cut off from the internet for the most of the day by my parents. I craved access to this wonderful world of endless possibilities and did things irl like reading books to kill time.
My first online experience was an America Online Star Trek fans chat room back in the early 90s. I remember some of whom I presume were "regulars" got a bit snippy at new people, and I thought "sheesh, what a bunch of angry nerds!"
I remember being delighted that I was able to find a transcript of the entire "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" movie online, I printed it out for a Holy Grail party we were hosting. It was exciting to find that there were other people out there who shared my rather niche interests. I also recall being delighted to find downloadable sheet music online.
My friend and I developed a few humor websites, because it looked interesting to learn how to create graphics and code HTML. This paid off because I then found a job as a content manager/graphic designer for a children's website; and then a few years later worked as a developer for a large ecommerce site.
I think the Internet was a much more positive place in those days, before social media and the algorithms that constantly put the most controversial and divisive content at the top of everyone's feed. However, I do recall thinking "it's really cool that I found this obscure forum devoted to medieval music and full of people that share my unusual interest -- but I wonder if people who are into really demented, messed-up stuff are also congregating in some weird corner of the internet?"
I first saw the internet once my junior year in high school, in 1996. I was writing a US history paper and my friend said I could look online for information about my topic, Karen Silkwood. I looked and the internet seemed like garbage to me, so that was it. Then I started college in the fall of 1997. I got my first email address. There was a UPS strike at the time, which was insanely inconvenient, since I'd just moved all my stuff across the country, from Seattle to NYC. I used UPS tracking for the first time to track my very, very delayed stuff and found that utterly magical. The internet wasn't particularly ready for primetime in those days, so I didn't use it much in the coming couple of years, save for email, which I liked very much, because it was a nice way to keep in touch with people. The first time I ever learned what googling was was in the summer or fall of 2000. I never emailed an attachment until just after I graduated, in 2001. Columbia's email was Pine, which was ghastly and only simple text. It was very difficult to even edit an email. When I turned in my work for the school newspaper, I had to walk to the office and turn in a floppy disk.
1994 or so, when it was mostly words and no ads. AOL of course. The "upgrades" were maddening, they'd move everything around, delete the stuff you liked, add in stuff you didn't want or need, and make it friendlier for advertisers. Guess that hasn't really changed, it seems to be the model for everything online now.
The really interesting thing to me is that in an environment where you can't tell a person's sex, race, religion or ethnicity what is the one thing you CAN judge/exclude people on? Who their internet provider is. So the .edu people were swanning about mocking the AOL people and I found it hilarious but also sad, because the human need to be an asshole is deeper than we realize.
That made me laugh, the hierarchical nature of internet providers and the deep divide of Apple vs Windows. I remember a male roommate mocking the “WASP girls who had colorful IMAC computers in their dorm rooms that matched their VW bugs”. I had zero interest in computers beyond the convenience of word processing for papers. I still think I was born in the wrong century, so, chrono-dysphoric?
Specifically about social media: These mostly have turned out to be both seductive and a waste of time. They also can woo the unwary into contentiousness and ill feelings. But the careful user of the internet generally can derive much good from it, always being very careful about checking, checking, checking as to the accuracy of nearly anything about which he/she is not personally aware. Even the anodyne (supposedly) Wikipedia can have little bombs in articles, as can similarly "unbiased" sources.
Oh wow... In the early 90s, I assume. My father was an early adopter of personal computing technologies, if not an innovator. I was the first in my school to have a personal computer at home, in 1983 or 84. My first email was so early it was just my first name and the email company, "usa.net". I cannot remember what I did with email, if nobody else I knew had it, but it was exciting to have one nonetheless. I knew that a whole new thing was happening, things were changing, going somewhere different, in terms of communications: distance and time were shortened. And I remember trying to imagine what that meant, and not being able to do so.
My dad was very excited about the internet, and taught me to enter chats. He was like, look, you can talk to people in any country in the world, it's like your Taiwaniese penpal, but in real time! One of the first "friends" I made via chat, a guy from Uruguay who was two or three years younger than me, I have on my facebook, but we are no longer in touch, not really. But during those first few months, OMG! It was INTENSE. He totally fell in love with me and I fell a little bit in love with him, even though I had a boyfriend. The Uruguayan sent me a mixed tape of music that I had never heard (because youtube didn't exist yet), after we had chatted about our musical tastes, and it is music that I still love. I still have the tape, even if I have no machine to play it. The intensity of that connection, with the Uruguayan, was a bit scary. I even felt it at the time, it felt wrong to be so connected with a stranger, and it felt wrong because it was clear that he was so much more connected than I was, he was absolutely in love with me. And it felt doomed, sort of. I mean, I was not going to move to Uruguay and he was not going to move to Puerto Rico. He was 16 or 17 and I was 18 or 19... I still remember the strangeness of the intensity of the feeling, the little anxiety and nervousness and excitement of getting a message from him--because we stopped chatting, we used email. Time difference and my refusal to make myself even more committed to what was, basically, a penpal, meant that we seldom met in the chat we'd first used. I remember that he once went to the US with his dad, for work, and I was living in the US, and he called me!!! He wanted to see if we could meet, and I was like, um, no. For one thing, the US is a continent-sized country, we cannot just meet (he was like, you can take a train, you can catch a flight!! I did not have the money to do this, as a student, and I had class, so...) This was nearly 10 years after our first contact. When I say, intense, I mean, intense. But it was lovely, too. We really could have been a happy couple if we had lived in the same country--we shared so many musical interests, life perspective, similar personalities, love of language and words... anyway...
My first internet experience was in 1980/1 getting a login at a NICNODE with Arpanet. My earliest writing is still archived in the Usenet archives. I found the entire edifice of Usenet collapsed into a heap of garbage around 1988/9 - early version of X/Facebook. I had friends globally through GLB parts of Usenet and travel to meet them was fun.
"When did you first go online? How did you access it?"
It must've been the late 90s in secondary school on school PCs using Internet Explorer. In Primary School we had like one PC for each year group and we collected coupons from supermarkets to buy them, but I'm not even sure they had internet connections. It took a while for "computers" plus "the internet" to become inseparable to me.
I think may Parents got their first home PC with internet some time around 2000, it was AOL and I remember the dialup sounds and how the internet would conk out if someone phoned in (or was it out, or both).
"What was it like?"
Like it is now but with no Facebook, twitter, reddit, or even YouTube. Make of that what you will.
"Where did you go?"
Internet forums about nerd stuff. Star Trek, Farscape, Warhammer 40,000, YuGiOh, Internet Atheism. Probably in that order.
"What were your early experiences on the Internet like?"
Fine. I was the quintessential lurker though. Too anxious to take part so I never really got too involved anywhere.
"How did the Internet change your ideas about the self and the way you relate to others?"
It was comforting to meet other people who shared my interests, as their weren't that many irl. But I never got involved on those sites, so I never put myself out there. I only really started actually talking to people online around 2015, but I can't say I actually have any "proper" online friends anymore as they all ghosted me after finding out I was a Terf (or whatever the male equivalent is). Isn't the internet marvellous!
I was in graduate school in the late 1980s. I ran coax through multiple floors of our building to connect our lab. The first thing I did was ping our .1 gateway, then I pinged a computer on another campus. It was magic! I think all of our IP addresses were fully routeable at the time - you could reach my workstation from anywhere (before computer security was a thing.) Dial up internet didn’t really exist yet (or was ridiculously expensive for a single person - hence my institution had to provide it.)
This was right before Archie (a primitive search, uh, engine?) To find anything, we had text lists of ftp sites that had anonymous login - I don’t remember how I got any of these, probably via Usenet groups.
Then in 1993 I fired up NCSA Mosaic for the first time, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It was the fall of 1995. It was a new student attending Harvard Divinity School and dating one of the proctors. You're hanging out in his room this was when Divinity Hall was still a dormitory, I mentioned that I hated going to the library to look things up. Yes why I didn't just use the online resources and I explained to know how to access the internet so he demonstrated for me. To showcase the capabilities of what could be done with this new tool he located some file that was posted online not at the school library I have my add, and began the download. And when I say download I mean just pulling up the image that he was requesting to see nothing more. This evening happened to be the night that the X-Files aired and it was on their second or third episode so far we watched the entire episode and at the end of the episode I was amazed to see that in the course of an hour half of the image had been pulled up. So after 45 minutes to an hour of dedicated effort we have been able to pull up an image that showed a naked man from his toes almost to his testicles. And yes that was a hand as to where my date intended the evening to go but for this anecdote the thing that you need to realize is I was amazed not I the testicles on the screen or anywhere else in the room by the fact that this technology was so impressive to me at the time I was blown away and I could start to imagine the possibilities though but I imagined was so just a fraction of where things went. It would certainly be a long time before I became a regular user. In the beginning of 2004, serving my first congregation for almost 10 years at that point there was a move among some of the leadership to take more and more of the decision-making activities among leadership online. Being a raging and recalcitrant dyslexic I had avoided even email you except for utter necessities but certainly had not gotten to the point where I checked it every day and I responded to these efforts by pooping them I just thought stretch the imagination just a bit too far to think that the general public was going to be able to adjust to asynchronous communication as it was conducted on these listserves and long chain emails. Advance three more years and I would be working for the largest online university in the world helping students navigate classes which constituted little more than a series of asynchronous conversations that could be linked and accessed from a single page. Advance several more years and I'm now teaching at another online school, and having had incredible success incorporating voice recorded notes on student papers I now intended to propose something much more radical to my faculty advisor. There was this tiny little startup group that had an amazing automatic grading system for papers that allowed you to submit as many versions as you wanted and it would give you useful feedback leading up to your final submission. Babe just work with the faculty and have you submit multiple versions of possible responses to the assignment you intended to use and they would develop this grading module for it. They did something with their other program having to do with social science research it was called qualtrics or something.
My first experience of the internet was also 1993, so that golden age of Usenet - with the added bonus that I was using it at work, for work - but with the freedom to use it for entirely non-work purposes, given that my manager had no idea what it was or what I was doing. So as long as my work targets were met I was free to roam around what interested me and I remember how intoxicating that freedom felt.
I was born in 1998, had access to the Internet under my parents' supervision starting in 2005 or so. I was allowed maybe 1 hour per day while in elementary school and far less supervision in middle school. Flash games and animations were big back then, so I played them and made some myself. I didn't use the Internet to connect with others or immerse myself in anime/fanfic and was mostly just discovering fun science facts, watching and playing fun stuff. When I do relate to other people online, it's mostly through sharing my opinions, not hobbies, so you can guess that I got into some nod-along conversations and also some arguments (I think the way I write does come across as more argumentative than I actually feel when I write). As for forming friendships beyond opinion-sharing, I'm still very old-school, perhaps even more so than folks older than me; I never make friends online. I have no problem talking to my offline friends online though.
To answer the part about my ideas about the self and the Internet... I don't really know. I never came across the idea that the Internet can provide insights into the self until 2 years ago. I find that idea bizarre to this day.
I was well behind the curve, I think. I was probably one of the first cohort to get a personal computer and learn to program it, in about 1983, and I just kept using my Acorn Electron, with its simple text and graphics, even when I wrote essays for my counselling diploma in the late '90s, which I printed out with its dot-matrix printer. About that time, I was using Windows computers where I worked, but rarely did we go online. So it was probably about 2000 when I got my own modern PC and a dial-up internet connection. I taught myself enough HTML to write a website to advertise my counselling business, and then I started using newsgroups and various chat services for connecting with colleagues.
I was very optimistic about the Internet's expected effect on humanity, empowering ordinary people to create goods and advertise services, to express themselves on an equal footing with more official sources, for democracy and education, even enlightenment (I was an idealist back then, waiting for the species to evolve to the next spiritual level). Obviously some of that is still true, but it's all been corrupted by ... whatever, corporate shite, big data, and now AI.
I set up my first blog in about 2010. I'd stopped counselling after the death of my mother, and then thought I'd segué into spiritual teaching. I began researching Buddhism, having dabbled in Eastern mysticism since my teen years, and joined some Buddhist forums, where I was astonished to discover very little peace and enlightenment, just endless argument. I also began making arrangements to go to a fairly serious meditation retreat, and the discussions with my mentor raised more doubts about the whole enterprise. Forums were great back then - I really miss those days - and one I joined was a sceptical forum, where I thought I would convince the throng of the wisdom of my idealist/spiritual views, but I gradually realised they were making sense and I was talking from desire and bias (over several months after I'd left). I became a sceptic and atheist myself, and switched my blog to a sceptical, naturalist one.
I used the Internet for several years on a quest to counter the kinds of beliefs I'd held earlier, delving into any kind of irrational thinking, conspiracy theories, religions, mystical ideas. I now thought this was the big awakening the Internet could deliver (as it had for me), not mystical enlightenment, but "The" Enlightenment, finally!
Not much sign of that either. Now, I think I've become pretty cynical (or perhaps stoical) about humanity. Learning stuff is great, except for the content. One of the more recent things I fell into discussion about is free will, which I now think we simply don't have (but it's a long story and often a long haul understanding why). The fact of it is potentially extremely positive, and it's not depressing once you get to grips with it, in fact the opposite (hence, stoical). So I suppose that's what the Internet has done for/to me - turned me from a hippie to a rationalist, and now I just kinda watch as the world unravels the only way it can. Gosh, what a powerful question you asked, Eliza!
In 1992 I had a professor who asked us to sign up for university email accounts. It was so confusing! We had to go to an IT dept, attend a session on how to connect to the VM mainframe, learn the commands to retrieve email and interpret the pages full of computer code that arrived with each email. We had to learn how to set up a modem--and everything was run off the command line prompt. I had no computer experience and it was very challenging.
At my next university, I had to attend sessions on how to connect to the VAX mainframe, learn VAX language, and learn how to use GOPHER, an FTP proto-search engine that would allow us to search the files of other university computers. It was all very challenging.
I was late to the Web because my then-husband was a technophobe and we didn't have a computer with the graphic capability--so only in 2000 did I get on the World Wide Web. At that point, I would write down the URLs of websites I wanted to return to because there was no really functioning search engine. Sometimes it would take long minutes for a single web page to load because we were using dial-up, of course.
I taught the history of the internet for a long time--explaining the layers (binary code, protocols, web, social media)--and I used to focus on the liberation from geographical social networks. For me, I was so excited not to be limited to those who just happened to be in proximity.
I became an enthusiastic user of Twitter in 2009 (and still use it) because it opened up access to all sorts of people and conversations I could never have in real life. I hated Facebook from fairly early on because it was mostly where people I used to know in college would opine politically--who cares! On Twitter I could interact with people in a variety of interesting fields instead--I was choosing categories of interest rather than categories of acquaintances.
I tracked how my students' usage evolved over time by polling them in every class as to what platforms or influencers or YouTube channels they preferred. That helped me grasp how different their experiences were from mine--and I've been careful not to generalize since.
I got the internet in June 1996. I was doing a master's degree at the time so my first-ever email address was an *.edu. I also had a nine-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter. Two things from those very early days stand out. First, the old Microsoft V-chat rooms with avatars. It was immediately apparent to me that this was something new. It was astonishingly easy to meet strangers from all over the world, and even to form bonds with these strangers.
Second was the day my daughter showed me Netscape Composer and said "Mommy, I think you can use this to make websites." Now THAT was an eye opener. My reaction was "Holy shit, I better learn this stuff RIGHT NOW or my 3rd and 4th graders are gonna be ahead of me in no time!" It motivated me to learn all I could so my little kids didn't leave me in the dust. I never wanted to be one of those parents who needs to ask their kids for help on the computer. I am proud to say I am STILL better than they are, almost thirty years later!
If I had to name a third thing, it would be porn. I knew this platform was gonna be great for porn and that the days of seedy "adult" bookstores were over. Alas my then-husband (NOT my kids' father, thank God) got completely addicted (it didn't take long) and sucked into the transverse.
I was born in the 80s and we never had the internet until maybe 1998 ish? I was in middle school and looked up information about “real fairies” and how to find them. It was a super innocent experience of the internet. It was also the first time I ever found images of female divinity. It was amazing!! I still remember the single color web pages with little sparkle things in the corners. It was so much fun.
My first internet experiences were in 1993, when everything was pretty much still text-based: Usenet, Lynx browser, mailing lists, library catalogs and databases. Using these did not change any ideas I had about the self; I don't recall anything I read or interacted with that was about gender. However, I so much enjoyed using these amazing tools to find information that I decided to become a librarian.
I loved the text based interface. LOVED IT. It was so enraging when everyone peed their panties over Apple with all their cutesy little icons and then PCs had to follow suit.
Weird thing is, I'm an illustrator. But my hatred of stupid icons is never ending.
Haha, same! usenet, mailing lists and ended up becoming a librarian!
My first internet experience was looking up "sex change surgeries" in 1996 on my new boyfriend's computer (I didn't have one, being a newly realized trans widow and living below the poverty line) because the husband I was separated from for over a year was going to Stanford University medical to have the full menu of the surgeries. I now advocate for the right of women like me to have swift annulments in these circumstances. Neddy told me he'd be away for 5 weeks and come back "a woman," and I owed him 5 weeks straight with our 5 and 8 year old after that. This means he took off 10 weeks from work for the surgeries and recovery. Much to my surprise, the "vaginoplasty" details were easy to find online. The "dilation" in the post surgery life was detailed, the fragility of the body and need to avoid heavy lifting was all in there. I refused to take this risk of our sons with him 24/7 in his immediate post op phase, and he began all sorts of accusations, initiating the period of defamation on by him of me, continuing to this day. A window into that experience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c99jaMY8rXQ&list=PLOFlPPQm71IhHtjMK1hw9guMJLql-yOkJ&index=5
I was at UC Santa Cruz in 1982 using the first online discussion boards. Only students from that one university could participate. Even then, in that small group, men punished any hint of feminism. I chose a non-gendered handle but as soon as they suspected I was a woman, that same thing that happens now happened then.
Men hate women. They let us know that over and over, for my entire life, in all media. This latest ideology of gendered souls is more of the same.
My first online experiences were also when it was text based in the mid-late 90s, message boards, email lists. I was around 20 at the time, and at university. I first got into alt.magick - paganism, magic, it was kind of forbidden content, and hard to access any information in my small town. Not long after that I got into Otherkin - people who believe they are either reincarnated from another world, or are "walk-ins" (have been taken over by other entitites, usually from another world or dimension. I was an "elf" - most people were elves, but there were fae and dragons and gnomes and satyrs. We all felt like we were "different" to everyone else we interacted with. Many otherkin would catch up with others at ren faires. Some even glued their ear tips together to try get them to stay in points. It's so embarrassing now to think about. I only told one or two people in real life, and I'm so glad I didn't tell everyone else. The beliefs just kinda faded away when I got busy with life and work, there was never any distinct finish to the thoughts.
I also thought gay men were hot (there were very few depictions of gay men in media or real life then - My Own Private Idaho was the hottest thing ever to my sheltered mind) - today I'd be told that was because I was really a man.
Sound kinda familiar?
I am 100% certain I would have transed if I were a kid today.
Oh and Otherkin weren't furries, I'm pretty sure furries didn't exist back then. Though I guess they would be considered very similar today.
I had to have been around 9 or 10. AOL - my parents had the Kids Only restriction on. I remember being extremely jealous of my classmates who could just open a browser and get to anything they wanted. Most of my time was spent on the Pokémon message boards and attempting to get into the Kids Only chat rooms. They were constantly full and you could only get in if your attempt was synced with someone leaving at the exact same time. I obviously became a passionate AIM partisan (RIP).
Yessss, mine was AOL Kids too!
I thought my parents were such a drag! In hindsight, they were just being good parents.
And sorry, to answer your last question. I definitely think it affected me. I became an internet addict during a time when internet addicts were still rare. I became consumed by internet friendships to the point where I neglected my real life in favor of staying up all night chatting with these disembodied people, many of whom were grown adults. I thought people around the world were so much more important than me and my life in Oklahoma (as I grow older, so does my love and appreciation for home). I had this sort of intense friendship with a 24 year old woman when I was 16 or so, and she would mail me gifts and the like. I never considered the appropriateness of it or whatever. Then one day she suddenly dropped me and I felt like the world was ending.
When I went away to college, I got back in touch with the real world and greatly enjoyed my experience. But there was always this sense of shame I had about having been so utterly “online” during a time when that wasn’t a thing, or at least wasn’t described that way. I would pretend to be surprised at various internet things my friends would show me.
I was born in 1995. I got unsupervised (but limited) access to computer with internet in 2005. I was using computer mostly to play video games and write stories in Word. I knew very few sites on the internet, but one of them was auction platform, so I was just searching for nice items or toys at cheap prices. Other than that I was googling: about my fav tv series, about pokemon, about game Diablo 2 I played with my mom at the time, random facts, music videos. On the sites owned by media companies and dedicated to kids there were dressup games, so I was searching for more dressup games (eventually encountered site with social media features and got immersed in that community, but I was 12/13 then?). As 10 y/o I developed wild interest in politics, so I was reading news online too, tho preferred paper version of newspaper which was always in our house. I collected fantasy themed pictures and was googling that. Major change happened in 2007, when we were taught in school how to set up our own blogs and search for other blogs in that service, I sank deep into that and soon become very online person, tho my early blogs were hot garbage fuelled by childish fascination with blog design.
However, growing up, the worst thing was being cut off from the internet for the most of the day by my parents. I craved access to this wonderful world of endless possibilities and did things irl like reading books to kill time.
My first online experience was an America Online Star Trek fans chat room back in the early 90s. I remember some of whom I presume were "regulars" got a bit snippy at new people, and I thought "sheesh, what a bunch of angry nerds!"
I remember being delighted that I was able to find a transcript of the entire "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" movie online, I printed it out for a Holy Grail party we were hosting. It was exciting to find that there were other people out there who shared my rather niche interests. I also recall being delighted to find downloadable sheet music online.
My friend and I developed a few humor websites, because it looked interesting to learn how to create graphics and code HTML. This paid off because I then found a job as a content manager/graphic designer for a children's website; and then a few years later worked as a developer for a large ecommerce site.
I think the Internet was a much more positive place in those days, before social media and the algorithms that constantly put the most controversial and divisive content at the top of everyone's feed. However, I do recall thinking "it's really cool that I found this obscure forum devoted to medieval music and full of people that share my unusual interest -- but I wonder if people who are into really demented, messed-up stuff are also congregating in some weird corner of the internet?"
I first saw the internet once my junior year in high school, in 1996. I was writing a US history paper and my friend said I could look online for information about my topic, Karen Silkwood. I looked and the internet seemed like garbage to me, so that was it. Then I started college in the fall of 1997. I got my first email address. There was a UPS strike at the time, which was insanely inconvenient, since I'd just moved all my stuff across the country, from Seattle to NYC. I used UPS tracking for the first time to track my very, very delayed stuff and found that utterly magical. The internet wasn't particularly ready for primetime in those days, so I didn't use it much in the coming couple of years, save for email, which I liked very much, because it was a nice way to keep in touch with people. The first time I ever learned what googling was was in the summer or fall of 2000. I never emailed an attachment until just after I graduated, in 2001. Columbia's email was Pine, which was ghastly and only simple text. It was very difficult to even edit an email. When I turned in my work for the school newspaper, I had to walk to the office and turn in a floppy disk.
1994 or so, when it was mostly words and no ads. AOL of course. The "upgrades" were maddening, they'd move everything around, delete the stuff you liked, add in stuff you didn't want or need, and make it friendlier for advertisers. Guess that hasn't really changed, it seems to be the model for everything online now.
The really interesting thing to me is that in an environment where you can't tell a person's sex, race, religion or ethnicity what is the one thing you CAN judge/exclude people on? Who their internet provider is. So the .edu people were swanning about mocking the AOL people and I found it hilarious but also sad, because the human need to be an asshole is deeper than we realize.
That made me laugh, the hierarchical nature of internet providers and the deep divide of Apple vs Windows. I remember a male roommate mocking the “WASP girls who had colorful IMAC computers in their dorm rooms that matched their VW bugs”. I had zero interest in computers beyond the convenience of word processing for papers. I still think I was born in the wrong century, so, chrono-dysphoric?
Specifically about social media: These mostly have turned out to be both seductive and a waste of time. They also can woo the unwary into contentiousness and ill feelings. But the careful user of the internet generally can derive much good from it, always being very careful about checking, checking, checking as to the accuracy of nearly anything about which he/she is not personally aware. Even the anodyne (supposedly) Wikipedia can have little bombs in articles, as can similarly "unbiased" sources.
Oh wow... In the early 90s, I assume. My father was an early adopter of personal computing technologies, if not an innovator. I was the first in my school to have a personal computer at home, in 1983 or 84. My first email was so early it was just my first name and the email company, "usa.net". I cannot remember what I did with email, if nobody else I knew had it, but it was exciting to have one nonetheless. I knew that a whole new thing was happening, things were changing, going somewhere different, in terms of communications: distance and time were shortened. And I remember trying to imagine what that meant, and not being able to do so.
My dad was very excited about the internet, and taught me to enter chats. He was like, look, you can talk to people in any country in the world, it's like your Taiwaniese penpal, but in real time! One of the first "friends" I made via chat, a guy from Uruguay who was two or three years younger than me, I have on my facebook, but we are no longer in touch, not really. But during those first few months, OMG! It was INTENSE. He totally fell in love with me and I fell a little bit in love with him, even though I had a boyfriend. The Uruguayan sent me a mixed tape of music that I had never heard (because youtube didn't exist yet), after we had chatted about our musical tastes, and it is music that I still love. I still have the tape, even if I have no machine to play it. The intensity of that connection, with the Uruguayan, was a bit scary. I even felt it at the time, it felt wrong to be so connected with a stranger, and it felt wrong because it was clear that he was so much more connected than I was, he was absolutely in love with me. And it felt doomed, sort of. I mean, I was not going to move to Uruguay and he was not going to move to Puerto Rico. He was 16 or 17 and I was 18 or 19... I still remember the strangeness of the intensity of the feeling, the little anxiety and nervousness and excitement of getting a message from him--because we stopped chatting, we used email. Time difference and my refusal to make myself even more committed to what was, basically, a penpal, meant that we seldom met in the chat we'd first used. I remember that he once went to the US with his dad, for work, and I was living in the US, and he called me!!! He wanted to see if we could meet, and I was like, um, no. For one thing, the US is a continent-sized country, we cannot just meet (he was like, you can take a train, you can catch a flight!! I did not have the money to do this, as a student, and I had class, so...) This was nearly 10 years after our first contact. When I say, intense, I mean, intense. But it was lovely, too. We really could have been a happy couple if we had lived in the same country--we shared so many musical interests, life perspective, similar personalities, love of language and words... anyway...
I first went online in 1996 on my dad's computer. After spending some time in a chatroom, I looked up cheat codes to some video game I don't remember.
My first internet experience was in 1980/1 getting a login at a NICNODE with Arpanet. My earliest writing is still archived in the Usenet archives. I found the entire edifice of Usenet collapsed into a heap of garbage around 1988/9 - early version of X/Facebook. I had friends globally through GLB parts of Usenet and travel to meet them was fun.
"When did you first go online? How did you access it?"
It must've been the late 90s in secondary school on school PCs using Internet Explorer. In Primary School we had like one PC for each year group and we collected coupons from supermarkets to buy them, but I'm not even sure they had internet connections. It took a while for "computers" plus "the internet" to become inseparable to me.
I think may Parents got their first home PC with internet some time around 2000, it was AOL and I remember the dialup sounds and how the internet would conk out if someone phoned in (or was it out, or both).
"What was it like?"
Like it is now but with no Facebook, twitter, reddit, or even YouTube. Make of that what you will.
"Where did you go?"
Internet forums about nerd stuff. Star Trek, Farscape, Warhammer 40,000, YuGiOh, Internet Atheism. Probably in that order.
"What were your early experiences on the Internet like?"
Fine. I was the quintessential lurker though. Too anxious to take part so I never really got too involved anywhere.
"How did the Internet change your ideas about the self and the way you relate to others?"
It was comforting to meet other people who shared my interests, as their weren't that many irl. But I never got involved on those sites, so I never put myself out there. I only really started actually talking to people online around 2015, but I can't say I actually have any "proper" online friends anymore as they all ghosted me after finding out I was a Terf (or whatever the male equivalent is). Isn't the internet marvellous!
I was in graduate school in the late 1980s. I ran coax through multiple floors of our building to connect our lab. The first thing I did was ping our .1 gateway, then I pinged a computer on another campus. It was magic! I think all of our IP addresses were fully routeable at the time - you could reach my workstation from anywhere (before computer security was a thing.) Dial up internet didn’t really exist yet (or was ridiculously expensive for a single person - hence my institution had to provide it.)
This was right before Archie (a primitive search, uh, engine?) To find anything, we had text lists of ftp sites that had anonymous login - I don’t remember how I got any of these, probably via Usenet groups.
Then in 1993 I fired up NCSA Mosaic for the first time, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It was the fall of 1995. It was a new student attending Harvard Divinity School and dating one of the proctors. You're hanging out in his room this was when Divinity Hall was still a dormitory, I mentioned that I hated going to the library to look things up. Yes why I didn't just use the online resources and I explained to know how to access the internet so he demonstrated for me. To showcase the capabilities of what could be done with this new tool he located some file that was posted online not at the school library I have my add, and began the download. And when I say download I mean just pulling up the image that he was requesting to see nothing more. This evening happened to be the night that the X-Files aired and it was on their second or third episode so far we watched the entire episode and at the end of the episode I was amazed to see that in the course of an hour half of the image had been pulled up. So after 45 minutes to an hour of dedicated effort we have been able to pull up an image that showed a naked man from his toes almost to his testicles. And yes that was a hand as to where my date intended the evening to go but for this anecdote the thing that you need to realize is I was amazed not I the testicles on the screen or anywhere else in the room by the fact that this technology was so impressive to me at the time I was blown away and I could start to imagine the possibilities though but I imagined was so just a fraction of where things went. It would certainly be a long time before I became a regular user. In the beginning of 2004, serving my first congregation for almost 10 years at that point there was a move among some of the leadership to take more and more of the decision-making activities among leadership online. Being a raging and recalcitrant dyslexic I had avoided even email you except for utter necessities but certainly had not gotten to the point where I checked it every day and I responded to these efforts by pooping them I just thought stretch the imagination just a bit too far to think that the general public was going to be able to adjust to asynchronous communication as it was conducted on these listserves and long chain emails. Advance three more years and I would be working for the largest online university in the world helping students navigate classes which constituted little more than a series of asynchronous conversations that could be linked and accessed from a single page. Advance several more years and I'm now teaching at another online school, and having had incredible success incorporating voice recorded notes on student papers I now intended to propose something much more radical to my faculty advisor. There was this tiny little startup group that had an amazing automatic grading system for papers that allowed you to submit as many versions as you wanted and it would give you useful feedback leading up to your final submission. Babe just work with the faculty and have you submit multiple versions of possible responses to the assignment you intended to use and they would develop this grading module for it. They did something with their other program having to do with social science research it was called qualtrics or something.
My first experience of the internet was also 1993, so that golden age of Usenet - with the added bonus that I was using it at work, for work - but with the freedom to use it for entirely non-work purposes, given that my manager had no idea what it was or what I was doing. So as long as my work targets were met I was free to roam around what interested me and I remember how intoxicating that freedom felt.
I was born in 1998, had access to the Internet under my parents' supervision starting in 2005 or so. I was allowed maybe 1 hour per day while in elementary school and far less supervision in middle school. Flash games and animations were big back then, so I played them and made some myself. I didn't use the Internet to connect with others or immerse myself in anime/fanfic and was mostly just discovering fun science facts, watching and playing fun stuff. When I do relate to other people online, it's mostly through sharing my opinions, not hobbies, so you can guess that I got into some nod-along conversations and also some arguments (I think the way I write does come across as more argumentative than I actually feel when I write). As for forming friendships beyond opinion-sharing, I'm still very old-school, perhaps even more so than folks older than me; I never make friends online. I have no problem talking to my offline friends online though.
To answer the part about my ideas about the self and the Internet... I don't really know. I never came across the idea that the Internet can provide insights into the self until 2 years ago. I find that idea bizarre to this day.
I was well behind the curve, I think. I was probably one of the first cohort to get a personal computer and learn to program it, in about 1983, and I just kept using my Acorn Electron, with its simple text and graphics, even when I wrote essays for my counselling diploma in the late '90s, which I printed out with its dot-matrix printer. About that time, I was using Windows computers where I worked, but rarely did we go online. So it was probably about 2000 when I got my own modern PC and a dial-up internet connection. I taught myself enough HTML to write a website to advertise my counselling business, and then I started using newsgroups and various chat services for connecting with colleagues.
I was very optimistic about the Internet's expected effect on humanity, empowering ordinary people to create goods and advertise services, to express themselves on an equal footing with more official sources, for democracy and education, even enlightenment (I was an idealist back then, waiting for the species to evolve to the next spiritual level). Obviously some of that is still true, but it's all been corrupted by ... whatever, corporate shite, big data, and now AI.
I set up my first blog in about 2010. I'd stopped counselling after the death of my mother, and then thought I'd segué into spiritual teaching. I began researching Buddhism, having dabbled in Eastern mysticism since my teen years, and joined some Buddhist forums, where I was astonished to discover very little peace and enlightenment, just endless argument. I also began making arrangements to go to a fairly serious meditation retreat, and the discussions with my mentor raised more doubts about the whole enterprise. Forums were great back then - I really miss those days - and one I joined was a sceptical forum, where I thought I would convince the throng of the wisdom of my idealist/spiritual views, but I gradually realised they were making sense and I was talking from desire and bias (over several months after I'd left). I became a sceptic and atheist myself, and switched my blog to a sceptical, naturalist one.
I used the Internet for several years on a quest to counter the kinds of beliefs I'd held earlier, delving into any kind of irrational thinking, conspiracy theories, religions, mystical ideas. I now thought this was the big awakening the Internet could deliver (as it had for me), not mystical enlightenment, but "The" Enlightenment, finally!
Not much sign of that either. Now, I think I've become pretty cynical (or perhaps stoical) about humanity. Learning stuff is great, except for the content. One of the more recent things I fell into discussion about is free will, which I now think we simply don't have (but it's a long story and often a long haul understanding why). The fact of it is potentially extremely positive, and it's not depressing once you get to grips with it, in fact the opposite (hence, stoical). So I suppose that's what the Internet has done for/to me - turned me from a hippie to a rationalist, and now I just kinda watch as the world unravels the only way it can. Gosh, what a powerful question you asked, Eliza!
In 1992 I had a professor who asked us to sign up for university email accounts. It was so confusing! We had to go to an IT dept, attend a session on how to connect to the VM mainframe, learn the commands to retrieve email and interpret the pages full of computer code that arrived with each email. We had to learn how to set up a modem--and everything was run off the command line prompt. I had no computer experience and it was very challenging.
At my next university, I had to attend sessions on how to connect to the VAX mainframe, learn VAX language, and learn how to use GOPHER, an FTP proto-search engine that would allow us to search the files of other university computers. It was all very challenging.
I was late to the Web because my then-husband was a technophobe and we didn't have a computer with the graphic capability--so only in 2000 did I get on the World Wide Web. At that point, I would write down the URLs of websites I wanted to return to because there was no really functioning search engine. Sometimes it would take long minutes for a single web page to load because we were using dial-up, of course.
I taught the history of the internet for a long time--explaining the layers (binary code, protocols, web, social media)--and I used to focus on the liberation from geographical social networks. For me, I was so excited not to be limited to those who just happened to be in proximity.
I became an enthusiastic user of Twitter in 2009 (and still use it) because it opened up access to all sorts of people and conversations I could never have in real life. I hated Facebook from fairly early on because it was mostly where people I used to know in college would opine politically--who cares! On Twitter I could interact with people in a variety of interesting fields instead--I was choosing categories of interest rather than categories of acquaintances.
I tracked how my students' usage evolved over time by polling them in every class as to what platforms or influencers or YouTube channels they preferred. That helped me grasp how different their experiences were from mine--and I've been careful not to generalize since.
I got the internet in June 1996. I was doing a master's degree at the time so my first-ever email address was an *.edu. I also had a nine-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter. Two things from those very early days stand out. First, the old Microsoft V-chat rooms with avatars. It was immediately apparent to me that this was something new. It was astonishingly easy to meet strangers from all over the world, and even to form bonds with these strangers.
Second was the day my daughter showed me Netscape Composer and said "Mommy, I think you can use this to make websites." Now THAT was an eye opener. My reaction was "Holy shit, I better learn this stuff RIGHT NOW or my 3rd and 4th graders are gonna be ahead of me in no time!" It motivated me to learn all I could so my little kids didn't leave me in the dust. I never wanted to be one of those parents who needs to ask their kids for help on the computer. I am proud to say I am STILL better than they are, almost thirty years later!
If I had to name a third thing, it would be porn. I knew this platform was gonna be great for porn and that the days of seedy "adult" bookstores were over. Alas my then-husband (NOT my kids' father, thank God) got completely addicted (it didn't take long) and sucked into the transverse.
I was born in the 80s and we never had the internet until maybe 1998 ish? I was in middle school and looked up information about “real fairies” and how to find them. It was a super innocent experience of the internet. It was also the first time I ever found images of female divinity. It was amazing!! I still remember the single color web pages with little sparkle things in the corners. It was so much fun.