Waking Up to the Web Part One

My purpose in this gemlog is to think "out loud" about economic matters, venturing outward from my official discipline of theology. But I can't talk about economics without talking also about my relationship to the internet, the web, social media, and now (most recently) Gemini.

I am one of those rare and lucky people who reached adulthood before the internet penetrated every aspect of our lives. My childhood was not broadcast for public consumption. I didn't have to go through adolescence with even more peer pressure and comparison as afforded by Instagram. My breakups and heartaches were not someone's News Feed. YAY!

I got my first email account (hotmail... aw...) when I went to college in 1994, where I was also assigned a school email account. I was glad to have this way to keep in touch with my parents, who lived in Slovakia while I was in the U.S., since there was no skype at the time and therefore phone calls were rare, precious, short, and expensive.

At that point, though, my email was entirely social. It had nothing to do with schoolwork (compared to my teenage son today who has thousands of pointless and therefore wisely unread emails in his school account) or regular work or anything else.

I also remember discovering Amazon at this time. I used it on the computer at the writing center where I worked. One time I loaded the page and it said "Welcome back, Sarah." I was so freaked it out by its knowing who I was that I literally looked around the room for cameras. Then gradually I deduced it had just "remembered" me as the last logged in user. (Clearly I didn't know enough at the time to log out after every usage on a public computer.)

It's a bit disturbing that now it probably _would_ be rational to assume that a camera is watching me.

I was never the kind to get sucked into web surfing. The main thing I liked about the internet was access to used bookstores so I could track down obscure things I wanted and buy them cheap.

I started and abandoned a few personal blogs.

While I was a magazine editor, I got us to start up a blog too, then another on a different platform, then a third. Crazy to think that when this began (around 2007) we paid $10000 for a developer to give us a blogging platform. We probably could have done it cheaper, but I'm amazed to think it even seemed reasonable at the time.

I don't think I ever really figured out how to use the blog medium properly to serve the magazine. The magazine also had an online forum, which attracted nasty arguments. Quelle surprise. I just knew I didn't want us to be like that. In practice that meant we weren't anything much at all.

In 2008, I think it was, I heard Facebook mentioned for the first time, from a web developer friend based in Boston. He mentioned how his girlfriend had broken up with him but he didn't want to break up so he thought he'd talked her out of it. However, a couple hours after she left, she changed her dating status on Facebook to "single." That's how he knew it was really over. My husband and I just nodded like we were cool kids who understood what that meant, other than it really sucks to be dumped by a website.

Sometime in that year I made a FB account because I wanted to get in touch with someone who only used FB messaging--no email. Email was still so new and revolutionary to me I couldn't fathom anyone giving up on it for an even _newer_ technology.

That account sat dormant for awhile. Then I moved to another country and was lonely, because that's what happens. I started posting on my FB account and suddenly had friends again. It seemed like a really good solution.

I'm not going to overstate the case and say it _wasn't_ a good solution in part. It helped the specific crisis of my linguistic and geographic isolation. I enjoyed the banter and engagement. I reconnected with a long-lost friend or two.

Also, we just didn't know better back then. Now we do.

I'll save the beginning of my turn against these things for Part Two.