Fifteen years ago when I would come home from school I had the choice of either watching CITV or playing on the computer for an hour. When I say computer, I mean a humongous grey machine sitting in the corner of my dining room and when I say ‘play’, I mean using the minimal amount of applications that were available in the olden days. We all remember spending hours on ‘paint’. But then, oh holy guacamole, did our lives transform when the beloved internet was introduced to our 1990s lives. That dial up tone is a sound that resounds through the memories of my childhood. The frustration when trying to phone your friends to see if they will come out to play but being unable to get through because their parents were surfing the web. What a tough life we led! Since then, some little magical IT elves and fairies have created a world with constant access to the internet…and isn’t it fantastic!
I couldn’t imagine life without the internet now. It baffles me to think of how our parents and grandparent’s functioned without it. But on the other hand, it baffles them how much I appear to rely on the internet. All of us 90s kids have fond memories of the development of the internet; we have grown up and matured together.
Let me just take you back to your early years of high school and bring MSN to the forefront of your memory. The day you installed MSN was the day that your pre-teen social life changed. People asking for your msn ‘addy’ which usually involved some ‘xoxo’s, ‘lilchik’ or ‘baby_’, however, this was the prime chat up line used. If a boy asked you this you knew he fancied you. Generally one of the first questions in a ‘convo’ being ‘who u luvin?’ or ‘you got webcam bbz?’. Yes… I went to a state school, can you tell? This means of communication first introduced us all to flirting with boys, procrastination and the emoji. And who can forget in exam season having to slyly turn off MSN sounds and quickly closing the window or slamming the laptop down to pretend to your parents you were studying hard!
Now let us grow older a few years and BOOM, a phenomenon called social networking exploded into our lives through the form of Bebo. I fondly remember spending many hours strategically choosing a wallpaper, writing a witty bio and changing my ‘Top 16’ to look as cool as possible. Your ‘Top 16’ of course being the way to identify who was seeing who or keeping up with catty girl fallouts, and if you weren’t featured in your best friend’s top pals… drama drama drama! Instead of doing homework, of course the best thing to do was creating cringe-worthy ‘do you really know me?’ quizzes or sending luv 4 luvs across comments. Despite being 15 and old enough to know better, there was always a sweet section in your bio about your high school boyfriend… we won’t discuss mine.
The god of the 21st century, Mark Zuckerberg, then introduced a new and improved social networking site which swiftly bumped off Bebo, and quite frankly, changed the way the modern world communicates – Facebook. Can you imagine a life without it? I certainly cannot. It allows us to have an online persona. We are all subconsciously super careful about what we post, pictures we upload and what we ‘like’ to make our lives look sublime online. I’m cringing at the fact I am a prime suspect for this. I would like everybody to think that my lifestyle is one to be desired, which is something, after looking at my profile for this article, I am guilty for. The majority of the time I am actually sitting looking like a hobo but my profile creates the idea that I’m living the Princess Di lifestyle on a student budget. If you were that one person without Facebook you would be severely left out of girly gossip, events and birthday parties. However, it has got to the point in our lives where our peers are beginning to get engaged and having little tots, which is plastered all over news feeds, but something I am currently appreciating being left out of!
My big question is how on earth did our parents manage to go through education without the internet? When I posed this question to my dear mother and father I just got an odd look and reply of “textbooks Emily… duh”. But we wouldn’t even know where to find the textbooks we need without our best pal primo, which is – funnily enough – featured on the internet. Personally, I would have no idea how to trawl through an academic journal to find the reference I am looking for; google scholar does that for me! Furthermore, communication with your course-mates is, of course, on Facebook. As if interacting face-to-face may sometimes just be a step to far…!
As 90s kids, the internet has developed rapidly throughout our lives. From that flaming dial-up tone to just being a touch in our pockets, the internet is something that we have come to heavily rely on. That feeling when your laptop breaks and there is no 3G reception honestly makes you feel as if you have suddenly been transported to the stone age. Our beloved internet allows us to chat to our friends, have a social and dating life, write fantastic essays to pass uni and go shopping. ‘Googling’ is even an adjective featured in the Oxford Dictionary. It baffles most of us that people once lived without it but it will continue developing and our children will look at us with disgust as we talk about the Facebook phenomenon and they’ll think we are old farts. SCARY. From being 2K6 cool kids on MSN to top notch, up and coming academics needing the internet for uni resources and procrastination tools, the internet will continually develop. What a cringe-worthy and hilarious time we have had growing up with it!