The Internet and Me

Well, it’s come up a little these days, so today I am going to talk about interaction on the internet! It seems like a pretty good time to talk about my experiences with the internet… it’s fun to reminisce.

My dad being who he is, we got the internet at home fairly early on when it was just starting to show up on the domestic scene. My earliest memories of the internet are quite simple. In grade four, Kim and I would write songs while we waited and waited for pictures of Sailor Moon to load (good old CadVision… it took forever). In the beginning, that was all I did on the internet: look at Sailor Moon pictures. I didn’t really feel the need to interact with anyone else by typing to them — what was the point in that, right?

Around grade five, I noticed my dad was playing an online game called Acrophobia where it’d give you and a room of people a topic and some random letters and you’d all have to individually think of some witty acronym for what the letters stood for (they weren’t actual acronyms) and then you’d vote for whichever one you thought was best. I thought it looked great so I started playing, too. For being ten years old, I was okay at it and won every once in a while. There was a chat aspect to the game, and it was then that I learned that sometimes it was just easier/more fun to lie about your age. In general, people didn’t react well when I told them I was ten. Like most kids, I wanted attention! I started telling people I was 16 or 17, because then at least they’d keep talking to me. Then I discovered it was even more fun to make up whole new personalities and characters! My very favourite one was to log on as OldGoatWoman and constantly lament that my false teeth had fallen out or that my cane broke. (Or, I’d say ‘I’m 84 today!’ and when people said ‘Happy Birthday!’ I’d say, ‘It’s not my birthday… I was 84 yesterday, too!’) It was on Acrophobia that I made my first ‘internet friends’. From what they told me, they were generally middle-aged American women. I liked them because they were fun, and it didn’t really matter that we didn’t have that much in common because no one ever talked one-on-one on the game. You were always in a group so you could just add what you wanted to the conversation.

Acrophobia was great and I told all my ‘real life’ friends about it. One of them, Joslyn, concerned me a little because she told me one morning at school that she met a boy on the chat and now they were internet dating. I thought this was creepy, especially since she said he was seventeen or something. Trying to be protective, Kim and I secretly made a new alias and joined the room Jos was playing in. We claimed to know her ‘boyfriend’ in real life, saying he was a loser. This proved fairly effective, since Jos announced later that they’d broken up. Looking back, I probably didn’t have anything to worry about, but you never really know, do you?

After about a year of playing that specific game, it dawned on me that I found the actual game of Acrophobia rather boring after so long, and was only logging on for the chat aspect. My dad suggested I just go on a chatroom for something that I was interested in, so I headed right over to a java-run Buffy the Vampire Slayer chatroom on someone’s rather high-traffic fansite. I didn’t stay there for very long, because somehow the people here weren’t like the people in Acrophobia. (Unsurprising, really, when you think about it. People attracted to a word game generally aren’t the 15-24 year olds that were watching Buffy at the time.) All they wanted to do was talk about how hot Buffy was. I thought she was hot, too, but I thought the show had more substance than that. Inevitably, some creep asked me if I wanted to Cyber and I said ‘okay’ because I had no idea what that was! (Do keep in mind that back then, what it is wasn’t such common knowledge for an eleven year old as it is today… and also keep in mind that I am faithful and too trusting…) My jaw actually dropped with surprise upon seeing the next thing he typed out, and I had never hit the X in the corner of a screen so fast! For a time I was completely turned off of talking to strangers on the internet… but that was okay, because with grade seven came MSN Messenger.

MSN Messenger was the coolest thing in the whole world. I ran home from school to chat with the kids I had spent all day with. By now I was old enough (and talking to enough of my schoolmates) that I no longer lied about my age or identity to strangers on the net. Around Christmas, I got so jealous of my brother’s Giga Pets website that I started one of my own (and he closed his to start a new one about Pokemon). Mine was about a computer game called Petz where you’d feed and take care of little pixelized cats and dogs. That itself was secondary to the feature that you could breed two of the pets together and the baby would have traits of both parents. Then you could breed that pet when it grew up, and so on. Eventually you got some interesting mixes, and you could email the pet file to someone else and they could play with the pet, too. (This sounds boring but it is very enthralling to 12-year-old girls, trust me.) Anyways, that’s how I initially got interested in graphics and web design, too.

The ‘Petz Community’ was startlingly massive. There were hundreds of Petz sites, and even more people who floated around who didn’t own sites. Word got around pretty quickly about what was going on where. Due to the subject matter, the Petz Community (a term used so often that it was shortened and well known among us as the PC) was probably 99.9% female. I only remember two particular boys (Josh and Jonas) who owned Petz sites, and that didn’t last long (more on that later).

My first website sucked. It was terrible. But I got better because I just kept on practicing. After a while, I found I was the owner of one of the more well-known sites in the PC and people actually liked to talk to me. I was consulted on things, I was invited in on group events, and I was loving it. I talked to a lot of girls my age and got pretty tight with some of them. I still remember their names but we have long since lost touch. At the time, it was just what I needed. We live in a world where interaction depends so much on what you look like. What you look like can dictate who you interact with. On the internet, that is still present but to a much lesser degree. It was the first time I’d felt ‘popular’.

Whenever you get hundreds of elementary to jr. high aged girls together over a medium where communication is uncensored and immediate, fights are just bound to break out. I don’t remember anyone actually fighting with me, but I remember thinking certain girls were mean and I’d never talk to them. Some girls would slander others on their site, others would form tight cliques that new people could never hope to enter. This all escalated quickly with a fairly dramatic breaking point — someone from the PC, one of the boys, Jonas, died.

I’d never talked to him, but it turned the PC on its head. Like everything on the internet, we had to assume the news of his sudden departure was true. His site never updated again and eventually it went offline. Some people had been seeking a change in atmosphere in the PC and they got it. On the whole, girls were nicer to each other. Everyone (or, most people) posted an outline of a dove somewhere on their site as a tribute to Jonas. Despite some of that bad blood, I still think about my ‘Petz years’ as some of the best of my life. I realized that, through the internet, I was connected to hundreds of people, even if through a thin thread. And oddly, that made me feel kind of good.

I’ll admit it, I liked Pokemon, too. For awhile I owned my brother’s Pokemon site along with him (which I wouldn’t necessarily have mentioned except that it initiated my next big internet phase…). To my knowledge, we were the only brother/sister Pokemon-site-owning duo, and the site saw some popularity (but was never a leading Pokemon resource, alas). We got a lot of mail, including letters from a boy right between us in age named AJ who lived in New Hampshire. That was a cool relationship, because he seemed equally interested in talking to both of us. One fateful day, he recommended this book I’d never heard of, Harry Potter, to me. Well, as you know, I loved it when I read it. After reading the next two, I was, like all the other Potter fans at the time, ravenously awaiting Book 4. AJ had started to play this Harry Potter game that he sent me the link to, and I was almost immediately hooked. Basically, it was entirely chat-oriented and you’d make a character who was starting in Hogwarts and interact with the other characters: Hogwarts MOO. (Yes, it’s hopelessly nerdy, deal with it.)

I loved it. At its best it was a story-writing game with a public channel that was always active. The purpose of the thing (to write) screened out most of the immature illiterates that the internet is famous for. After joining the MOO at the end of grade eight, my use of the internet grew enough that I probably could not hope to mention all the things I’ve been involved in online, but I’ll try to describe some of the bigger ones.

Around this time is when Kim and I launched Tearstone Graphics, a site where we’d make free website graphics for fledging sites. This was very, very popular. We’d take custom orders and we were always busy.

Starting my .net domain in grade nine where I posted my journal and photographs is worth mentioning, too. Once, someone emailed me saying that she recognized one of the people (my cousin Trevor) in my photo gallery as one of her classmates. Another time, when we had an Australian exchange teacher, I was chatting with a friend in Australia when somehow the conversation came upon science teachers. We realized that, by some coincidence, it was our teachers who had switched; she had the teacher my school sent to Australia and we had hers. Through it all, I’ve learned the world is just getting smaller.

Eventually I got into the online gaming scene, starting with Starcraft, then Warcraft 3, GuildWars and, now, World of Warcraft. For some reason, WC3 is the only one of these with interactions really worth mentioning.

Never let people on WC3 learn that you’re an (at the time I was) eighteen year old female. The chat is largely un-moderated. The players are primarily male. They will ask you out. Of all the conversations I’ve had, two in particular stick out.

The first, which was about a year ago, was when someone asked if I was hot, to which my reply was, ‘uh…’ and so he asked for my MySpace, assuming I had one. Curious as to what he’d reply with, I asked him why exactly he needed a picture. His eyeroll-provoking answer was, ‘so that I can visualize having sex with you’. “Why would I want that?” I asked, and a different person on the channel added, “Yeah, why would she want that?” I thought it was hilarious that the second guy chimed in, I don’t know why.

The second happened while we were actually playing a game. My ally, who declared himself as 13/m deduced that I was a girl (my login name was Kalynn) and immediately started asking insanely personal questions. Cloaked in the near-perfect anonymity of Battle.net, I answered each and every one for no reason other than that I hoped my responses would make a small dent in the stupid stereotypes the secular world holds today. Somehow I think that made me gain his trust, and he decided to spill out his life story to me while we were rallying panthers and massive spiders to attack the other team. He said no one understood him, he said he could never hope to be cool and that he only talked the talk to try and create a facade. Feeling that he’d let his guard down, I just told him that there was life past grade school, eventually the smart people can become more successful than the ‘cool’ people, and that someday he’d meet people who’d accept him for who he was. I didn’t get much of a reaction, but I wasn’t really expecting one. I’m pretty sure we lost that game but I hope some of what I said hit home.

I do wonder how many different people I’ve encountered over the internet. I wonder if it’s close to a million, or far beyond a million. But one thing is for sure: it has changed who I am. Interactions over the internet do affect people. They’re just as real as face to face.

Now that my long background has been explained, I’m just going to discuss a little about the conclusions I’ve come to.

1. We’re told that much, much more than half of our face-to-face communication is nonverbal. This is probably true. Over the internet, we lose all of that percentage. Emoticons only go so far and they, too, can be misinterpreted. Who can honestly say that they haven’t said something sarcastically over the internet and had someone take it literally? Some people think we’re becoming more and more inept at face to face communication, and I think that is simply because we’ve learned to hone our writing so that we no longer need visual clues to get our meaning across. This takes a lot of practice. I doubt many have mastered this. Myself, in an attempt to portray cheerfulness when I am happy while talking to someone, I know that I usually come off as juvenile or air-headed, over-excitable. It’s hard to portray exactly what you want to, especially considering you have no control over how someone else will interpret you. This is true in real life, too, except that you have the added help of actually seeing their face and body language react to you, and you can adjust accordingly. Not true of the internet. That’s why I avoid intense emotional conversations over the net if I can. I could never tell someone “I love you” for the first time unless they were physically in front of me. Because I’d miss out on that visual reaction, and that would just make me feel like I’d been cheated out of something extreme.

2. The internet gets rid of quite a few of the social and cultural barriers that keep us from interacting with our fellow man face to face. In text, you are who you are. You are what you say, and nothing else. I think if you put a large group of anonymous people into a chat program and had them talk daily for an extended period of time (several months) without being allowed to disclose their age, gender or any other social demographics, people might be very, very surprised who they had ended up becoming friends with (upon all the demographics being revealed at the end). It’s true for me: I know that some of the people I talk to online every day I never would have embraced a friendship with in real life, mainly because I wouldn’t have encountered them, approached them, or thought of them as someone I had a lot in common with. Plain text is fantastic for bridging age gaps, social status and thousands of miles.

Hogwarts MOO is a good example of this for me. I still log on there, less for the game and more (a lot more) for the people. They’re enough like me that we share a wavelength and different enough from me that they’re very interesting. (Kristen logs on here, too, so don’t be thinking I’m alone in this!). Some of them are working towards undergraduate degrees, Masters’, PhDs. Others have learning disabilities. They’re all around the world, some in America, Australia, Germany, France, England. They are all ages, the youngest regular being seventeen, the oldest being in their thirties and forties. I really value the rapport I have with them, truth be told.

3. Emotions on the internet are easily as potent and real as they are in face to face interaction. I can honestly say I have been flat-out angry with people I’ve never met. Personally angry at something they said to me personally — not the same as being offended by something a politician said. I’ve been more angry and more disappointed with some of my internet friends than I’ve been with my real-life peers. Similarly, I can honestly say that I love people I’ve never met. Personally love them for the friends they are — not the same as thinking you love a celebrity. Every emotion I’ve felt away from a computer, I’ve felt at a computer. Just because communication through the web lacks visual auxiliary does not make it less real.

Well, I doubt any of this comes as much of a surprise to anyone. I always was a child of the net and probably will always be plugged into it in some way or form my whole life.