Re-Joining Participation in the Void

 I created my first blogspot when I was around 13 or so. My dad is a computer technician, and he gifted me an old laptop the company he worked for no longer needed. I grew up with the internet, side by side. As it progressed, I did - Myspace when I was 11, Facebook when I was 13, Twitter when I was 14, Snapchat when I was 16, Instagram when I was 17, etc. It felt like the beginnings, us all testing the waters with social media. YouTube seemed like it was always there (at least it was when I got the laptop). Staying up late stuck in cycles of watching tragedy unfold on released cc footage. The worst escalator accidents, amusement park fatalities, hey, here - watch the video of the first on air suicide, and over here, people put cereal in their ass and call it fruitlooping (that one was passed around in the school cafeteria, after smart phones became the new norm as I was in high school). 

It all existed and we all existed within it - but first, before any of that, I remember blogspot and shelfari and hellopoetry, and, maybe tumblr as my main stays in my pre-teens. I loved having a private, yet public, internet diary. A sense of security that the void is so big, anonymity can exist, and yet the vulnerability of your dumb, useless thoughts not being confined in a notebook, but existing with everything else in the vacuum of the internet. 

I wasn't a part of the internet and social media as it was beginning, but I was growing up as they were - I'm not trying to claim I saw the very first steps - I didn't. But I think I grew up in that sweet spot. Dial up, long corded phones in the kitchen, VCRs, cassette tapes, quickly turning into sleeker desktops, flip phones, internet communities, widespread role playing games, then smart phones and social media and phone games and farmville and whatever the fuck, becoming the "normal" so smoothly, I didn't even have to take notice. And I spit into the void constantly, and sometimes found strangers, also anonymous usernames, who were doing the same thing.

Throughout college, and now, into my 20s, the internet shifted into networking all. the. time. My Instagram is a mixture of life events and a portfolio, my Twitter is set to private when I get interviews for jobs, and Facebook is just a place for me to promote events I'm participating in, or catalogue memories with photo dumping, letting my family know what I'm up to.

I'm almost 25 and feel weird about it all, but I miss the beginning of my exploration on the internet - I miss participating in the void in a senseless, dumb way - just speaking into it for no reason at all.