Ten years ago, I was eight, and only just started to familiarise myself with the magical world of Paint. I was thirteen when I learnt how to connect onto the internet with my high tech 56K modem. The static sound was like music to my ears, and getting disconnected was practically the end of the world.
When I die and my life flashes before my eyes, I will experience about another two deaths just seeing the hours of my life wasted alteRnaYting Betw3En uPPaH aNd Low3RR caYse AnD intent!OnaLLy mi$peLLinG th!nGs cOz iT waSZe c00Lie$.
I officially started losing my grip when people started using the word 'zor'. I still don't understand what that means!
Does the word Ringo ring any bells? If so, shameful isn't it? It was my first taste of social networking. In order to upload photos, I laboriously had to take them using a film camera, get them developed, and scan half of them onto the computer (the other half had bad lighting - probably because my finger was covering the flash). By then, my latest photos were at least two months old.
People (including myself) migrated en masse from Ringo to Hi5 to Friendster to Bebo to Myspace to Facebook. What influenced this move considering they all do the same thing? Maybe it was the super accurate quizzes on offer. Then maybe it's also because we were able to experiment with personalised fonts, backgrounds and special effects. And maybe it's because we could add moving images such as .gif files and Youtube clips. And the one that prevails is usually the one that entails all of the above.
The tabloid news will tell us that our generation is known for pill popping, binge drinking, drunken fights, promiscuity and… online relationships. But as if our parents didn't do the same thing! Whose parents were hippies and did mushrooms? Whose mum got pregnant when she was sixteen, or before she was married? Whose dad STILL gets drunk with his friends every weekend? I know parents who fit into at least one of these categories and they are all wonderful people.
During the 1800's, people were meeting and having romantic relationships through morse code. The book Wired Love is based on a female and male operator falling in love online (the telegraph line, that is).
The first telegraph wedding took place in 1876 between San Diego and Camp Grant, AZ (137). Online telegraphic romances between operators were common and coded message between lovers were as well. This predates internet dating by more than a century. - http://mlennert.wordpress.com
Take this blog. Without the hyperlinks on my Myspace page, you may have never come across this site. Without MSN, a friend of yours probably wouldn't have been bothered recommending it to you. And perhaps, without this blog, you wouldn't have any other reason to approach me in real life.
So are meeting people on the internet and getting to know them through IM really all that new? Or have we just found new ways of doing old things?
Online interaction is shedding its old stigmas. One only needs to look at the number of commercials promoting dating websites for adults. They've gotta be funded by something. Funded by the success rate.
Instead of being seen as a substitute for reality, is the virtual world the new real world?
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