First Web Writing Assignment: Encounters of the Early Internet Kind

I first used the internet when I was eleven years old.  The year was 1996, and my family and I were living in Mountain Home, Idaho, an Air Force town of 9,000 residents.  My dad owned a government issue IBM laptop that probably weighed more than I did, while my mom used a Macintosh LC III.  A precursor to the iMac, the LC III featured an impressive 40 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive.  The Macintosh was faster than my dad's laptop and was my preferred computer.

We used a dial-up modem with AOL.  To this day I grind my teeth when I think of the high-pitched grating noise of that modem.  I never really surfed the web, probably owing to the fact that it took 10-15 minutes for a single page to load.  I remember sitting rather impatiently while pictures and text loaded, but still being pretty excited by this new-fangled technology.

I mostly used e-mail to stay in touch with my father during his six month deployment in Saudi Arabia.  Letters took weeks to reach us and phone calls were few and far between.  I was very thankful that the internet, however excruciatingly slow, allowed me to talk to my dad on the other side of the world.  I remember learning about the Khobar Towers bombing and the 19 Air Force personnel killed in the attack.  Needless to say, my family and I were incredibly scared and concerned about my father's safety.  Within the hour we got an e-mail from my dad saying that he was alright.  I'm sure the phone lines were either jammed or down for security reasons, and that one e-mail saved us a lot of worrying and waiting.

Chat rooms were becoming popular around the time Mountain Home got its own internet provider.  My best friend Nicole and I would often hang out at her house, as her parents' computer was quite a bit faster than my family's.  We loved Yahoo Chat and would create "private" chat rooms, inviting only our friends in order to gossip.  We also picked up some pretty silly slang and abbreviations, calling inexperienced chatters "newbs" and writing things like ASL (age/sex/location), AFK (away from the keyboard), BAK (back at the keyboard), JAS (just a second), JK (just kidding), TTYL (talk to you later), LMAO (laughing my ass off), or if something was really funny, ROTFLMAO (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off).  The list goes on and on.  I don't even want to think about the amount of time Nicole and I spent in chat rooms, discussing nothing of any importance and frittering away time that could have been spent more productively, or at least in more interesting ways.

Within a year, chatting stopped being fun and games.  Spam bots began entering chat rooms posing as real people.  If you unwittingly chatted with a spam bot, you would eventually receive a link, which more often than not led you to a pornographic website.  Then there were the dirty old men, pedophiles that tried to coerce young children, boys and girls, into engaging in so-called cyber sex.  I was pretty grossed out and scared by all this, and stopped using chat rooms for good.

My first brush with the internet was bittersweet.  This initial encounter with a new technology contains elements of both Vannevar Bush and Nathaniel Hawthorne's visions of the future.

Bush's memex, "a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility", sounds eerily reminiscent of computers and the advent of the World Wide Web.  Bush envisioned his memex working primarily for scientists, organizing their research, creating "trails" between items, and providing a faster means of communication in order to facilitate technological innovations that would benefit, rather than harm, humanity.

This focus on connectivity and communication harkens back to my early days of internet use, whether I was e-mailing my dad from 7,500 miles away or chatting with friends that lived right down the street.  Like science for Bush, the internet "has provided the swiftest communication between individuals".

However, my earliest encounters with the internet also had a dark side.  Like Hawthorne's airtight wood stove, the internet "is a great revolution in social and domestic life".  With the loss of the fireplace hearth, that "cheerful, homely friend of our wintry days", Hawthorne predicts a future where families will no longer gather together, where there "will be nothing to attract these poor children to one centre".

Rather than chatting with my friends online, we could have spent time together in person, seeing as how we all lived in the same town.  We wasted countless hours learning abbreviations for banal chat room phrases, talking about nothing, when we could have spent some time outdoors, with our families, or doing better in school.  Not to mention the threat of possible sex offenders roving the internet.  Our "one centre" was and in many ways still is a computer screen, and, as Hawthorne would say, "the world looks darker for it".

Many aspects of my early use of the internet, such as long distance communication, had a positive impact on my life, while wasted hours in chat rooms were not so beneficial.  The internet has connected the world, but it has also caused isolation, whether from family, friends, the outdoors, or in extreme cases, from reality itself.