Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Me, Myself, and I-nternet

I am a "Digital Native". As I stated before, I have been using the internet since I discovered it at my mothers work at the age of 6 and printed off pages and pages of pictures and articles regarding the television show THE SIMPSONS. From then on, I was hooked. By grade 7 I was a 'master' of HTML and had a few of my own web pages hosted, for free, and without adds, at various host websites. I had become apart of a community of young adult webpage makers. There were a bunch of us, and the better we got the better hosting we got. The point was: To make webpages, add a guest book, and create images using paintshop pro to make the webspaces attractive. My website became popular enough that I was invited to be hosted by a webspace I was envouse of called gemz.net. At the time, I honestly felt like there were only about 100 of us young adult web designers and that we were all connected some how. We often had buttons on our pags linking to other peoples websites, the better the website, the more buttons people would put up... there was always a race to see who could get hosted at a better web site. But then, cgi became available and I had no idea how to use it! By grade 9, my web page creation days was over.

Meanwhile, in grade 7, i was introduced to an instant messaging system called ICQ. I had about 5 classmates on their and about 10 'random' people; some of whom were apart of this 'webpage making youth group' that I already spoke about. By grade 9, I had over 50 people from my highschool on my ICQ. ICQ was my main means of contacting people, I became close friends with people I never use to talk to, or would not otherwise get a chance to talk to, as well as, found a deeper connection with some boys. If it wasn't for ICQ, i don't think I would have been with my frist boyfriend: we were able to talk about anything without feeling the other was judging us; face-to-face was a thing of the past and now it was all about pouring your heart out.
Needless to say I was introduced to MSN in grade 9 and finally deleted ICQ in grade 10 due to the fact that you could log on to MSN on ANY computer that had MSN and get all your contacts, where as with ICQ you had to download an online version from a website to use it anywhere.. it was just too 'complicated'.

I could probably write a 2,500 word essay on my internet past so I think I'll stop with the re-cap there. This is my current online life:
- Facebook, I check it at least 6 times a day; I use it for promoting my club nights, talking with friends, posting pictures, making connections
- Ravevictoria.com, I use it to post questions, promote my club night, see what is going on in other peoples lives or around victoria, check out events
- livejournal, I have a livejournal which has been neglected in the last couple of months but I usually do write an entry at least once every two weeks; I also can check up on my friends lives, both near and far, and get all the juicey details
- E-mail: I have a total of 4 E-mail accounts. 1 hotmail (that I've had since I was in grade 6) and 3 gmail, one that was my original gmail which is now spam, 1 that is my person e-mail, 1 that is for my promotion company
- www.verycherryproductions.com, I am attempting to come out of web page retirement and make a web space for my promotion company. Wish me luck!

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