A Brief History of a Life Online

In the beginning, there was no internet. But then, in 1998, my parents drove us to a big-box electronics store where we picked up a boxy Compaq Presario and drove it home and plugged it into the wall in the downstairs guest bedroom, and then suddenly, there was a little bit of internet. I was six years old, and I mostly remember marveling at the gratification I felt being able to instantly load Britney Spears fan pages and the Disney games website and Microsoft Encarta with the historical trivia game and being mildly freaked out by the computer’s alien-sounding dial-up noises.

Then, a few years later, there was AOL Instant Messenger. There were chat rooms. My neighbor Emily showed me Kazaa, which she used to download music. I was a mostly normal and well-adjusted kid, but I felt very lonely, and the internet was suddenly this portal that could connect you with anyone. It felt full of possibility. Bored during the dog days of summer in middle school, I spent days and days on LiveJournal and Xanga, joining a Harry Potter roleplaying community and reading everything I could, which unfortunately included a lot of aesthetically pleasing and psychically damaging pro-anorexia blogs those days. My friend Sarah showed me Neopets, which felt very childish to me, and The Sims, which did not. We wrote posts on Blogger, for some reason. It felt very grown up to publish my own words on a website that…