I admit, I'm a little hesitant to post this because when I was writing it on Monday, my cable Internet went out for THREE DAYS. But...oh why not. Let's throw caution to the wind.
My parents got a home Internet connection in the summer of 1998, just as I was about to enter my senior year of high school. It was dial-up. In case you're too young to understand what that means, I had to listen to this noise while I waited for the Internet to connect. Yes, seriously.
And then I could only go on in 20-minute spurts because it was connected to the one phone line in the entire household. Because nobody had cell phones yet either.
I'll wait for your screams to die down.
I was very excited to finally have Internet. I thought the world was really on to something there.
But I have often wondered what it would have been like to really grow up with the Internet, as in have had it always like kids do today. (Although there is the the tragic fact that it would have ruined the plot of many great 80s and early 90s movies.)
You know the one aspect of it I wished I had the most? It's definitely not Facebook (I do not need pictures of me from middle school through high school anywhere online). Not even wikipedia -- though that would have made homework easier, I still rather enjoyed doing research at the library.
Nope. It's the boon to mankind that is Urban Dictionary.
Why, you might ask? Because there were many, many slang terms that I didn't know as a teenager and was too embarrassed to ask about. It might be because we didn't speak English at home and those are vocabulary words they don't really go over in ESL. Or the library encyclopedia for that matter.
Kids today; they're so lucky. Because knowledge is power, people.
What is the one website that you'd send back to young/teen you?
So many sites to choose from, but I think I'd send youtube back to myself. Having all of those videos to watch at the click of my mouse is just fantastic. I'm sure my friends and I would have made and posted some amazing (read: horrible but amusing) videos! On second thought, maybe it's a good thing that we weren't able to post any of the videos we made.
ReplyDeleteI am so so so glad that neither Facebook nor YouTube were around during our high school years. Can you imagine the song parodies, TV production commercials and backstage photos that would be publicly haunting us?
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