I still remember the day that I first got my AIM account in the 6th grade. My cousin who was in college made one for me and it was “Lakerboyjosh” or something like that. I used to go home and watch television or read books, but after I got AIM I started to occasionally log into my AOL dialup. It hadn’t gotten to the point where I would spend hours or anything drastic like that, but it was definitely the beginning to my obsession with the Internet. During the AIM era and before I still had no real use to be on the internet. Back in middle school and before the internet and computer for that matter was only useful as a tool to play video games. The computer wasn’t much different from my playstation, except that I had fewer games on my parents computer. Occasionally I would do some research with Google for some class projects, but being in middle school those kinds of projects were not often and did not necessarily require the internet.
The era when I began to frequent the internet and social media a lot was when I was in 7th and 8th grade with the beginning of Xanga. I would post some of the most foolish things on Xanga, like specifying how much I disliked some kids and I had made fake accounts with a friend of mine to post rude comments on some of the girls in our class’ Xangas. I definitely am not near proud of my behavior back then, but from my recollection I never did anything that I know of that would warrant my complete shame and banishment from society. However, a girl in a lower grade did get in trouble with our school for posting really dreadful and scary messages. I was called in and talked to because the school felt that I was the leader of everyone using Xanga. I still am baffled by what they meant and how they came to believe that I had anything to do with that situation. It’s not like I was organizing anything; however, it did occur to me that since I was one of the first people to adopt social media at my small middle school the kids who were after me would adopt my public behavior.
It was then that I started to clean up my social media behavior. I had stopped using Xanga after that incident and began to use Myspace. It was not that popular in 8th grade, but once I entered into high school everyone was on Myspace. This was also around the time that I created a Facebook, although none of my friends who were my age had one. I remember there being so many kids from my high school on Myspace. I met a lot of kids through Myspace in high school because everyone would add each other. I still said foolish things on Myspace, but nothing I would really regret in the future. Back then I did not feel like Myspace was really unsafe and I’m not sure if Myspace collected information. I liked Myspace a lot but by the end of my sophomore year people had started to migrated to Facebook due to the influx of spam on Myspace.
Facebook was really interesting and I did spend a lot of time on it. I began to get tired of Facebook because it is really repetitive (I guess all of social media is) and there are some people that will always say hi to you on Facebook and never show up in real life. I’ve started to appreciate those who are in my life and talk to me face to face. That is one of my reasons why I deleted my Facebook. Those who need to contact me have my cellphone number and email and those who matter have always texted me anyways. My use of Facebook was a lot greater than anything else I did on the Internet and I started to feel like the only reason that I was on the Internet was to be on Facebook.
Also I don’t think that Facebook is good my future. I don’t want to have that much information available about me on the Internet and I am not comfortable with the idea that Facebook collects information from other sources like banks about me. Had Facebook stayed purely a social media entity with the ability to be the passport to the internet so that I didn’t have to log into every website then I would still use it. But I do not need to put myself at risk if someone were to hack Facebook.
If I had to categorize I would say that I would check my cell phone and email the most. I used to spend the most time on the internet while on Facebook, doing nothing. I don’t really want to do nothing on the Internet anymore.
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