A Special Thing

I wrote my first email in 1996, when I was 14, to my English teacher, from the family email account. If I remember correctly, the email consisted of just one line about how I wasn’t sure how to use this email thing. I wasn’t a very eloquent child.

 

As a teenager living in Singapore in the mid-90s, I was lucky that my parents and, in particular, my older brother, had the foresight to recognize just how cool this whole internet thing really was, and let us get online. My brother and sister introduced me to TinyTIM, a MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) that my brother spent an inordinate amount of time on, always signaled by the satisfying bleep bloop melody of our dialup modem. I made my own character (named Constantine because I was a Hellblazer reader at the time) and my sister showed me how to use the text interface to create things and explore a universe purely imagined in my head. Sort of a textual precursor to the Sims for me, I spent time thinking about and writing vivid descriptions of what my online home looked like. At the same time, I was hanging out in chat rooms (much to the chagrin of my parents who had to deal with the phone bill) like Alamak Chat, IRC, and a site that had a chat room called “Think Cafe”. The conversations weren’t always mature or even remotely intelligent, but a whole new world opened in front of me. I remember thinking that it was pretty crazy that I was sitting in Singapore, on my balcony, sweating in the tropical heat, talking to people of all ages from elsewhere – mostly the United States. Sure, there were creepsters, and there were trolls, but teenagers adapt well and I knew where my limits were and when to leave. Rule of thumb: Do not engage with anyone who calls themselves HotStudddddddXXXX2484. 

 

Somehow I stumbled upon gURL.com and other similar sites, which provided a plethora of teen girl-focused content about things I couldn’t really talk to my parents about like sexuality and body image. I’d always had strong female role models growing up (my sister included) and was proud to label myself a feminist. Seeing an online community of women writing frankly about womanhood made me feel less alone and more inspired in a traditional Asian environment. I kept clicking and following links, even when it took forever for pages to load because it was so cool to put animated gifs on your webpages. I got my first, personal email account with Hotmail. I had Geocities (RIP) and Angelfire accounts and taught myself basic HTML so I could, again, create my own Thing, and post stuff I wrote. My sister had really gotten into designing sites and she set me up on my first “online journal” right before I went to Norway. I kept at that for a while, and eventually, when I got lazy, I switched over to LiveJournal which made online journaling much easier. By my sophomore year in college, I was (Nerd Alert!) a regular reader of and poster on the LJ knitting community - It was there that I posted my first ever self-written knitting pattern (for a shrug – they were en vogue ten years ago) and was amazed by the responses I got from people I barely knew who tried out the pattern and shared the results. High speed internet in college let me download music (legally and um, otherwise. #Oops.) and I embraced listening to all kinds of music and sounds – bands I had never heard of, bands that I loved and then gave up on, music that got me through some rough patches. I still have some of those files on my iPod.

 

It’s an amazing thing when you spend some of your formative years in a place that doesn’t exist on a physical plane. The amount of access to information I had because of the internet allowed me to grow and mature at a pace that I felt I was ready for. I learnt skills like curating information for myself and respecting the (sometimes unwritten) rules of engagement in online communities. I’m still learning all the time from what people say and write and share, and most days I still feel like my dorky teenage self clumsily ambling towards elegance and maturity.

 

The internet we know now isn’t exactly the same internet I grew up with – things have become faster and more sophisticated (even animated gifs!) – but it’s still the kind of arena where people can learn, engage, and express themselves. Matt Cutts said, in the context of opposing SOPA/PIPA, “If you think the internet is something different, something special, then take a few minutes to protect it.” I do think the internet is something really special, something really different, and I’ve taken it for granted a lot in the past couple years. Protecting the “specialness” of the internet isn’t just about opposing SOPA/PIPA – It’s also about standing up for democratic values, free flowing information, and choices. It’s assuring to know that the internet does have its protectors, and together we’ve made an impact to tell the government that there’s more at stake here than “online piracy”.

 

I guess this long, personal, rambling post is a way to say it means a lot to me that the internet I grew up with was open and free, and I hope we can keep the heart of this very Special Thing. It would mean a lot to kids like me. 

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