journals from B.F. (Before Facebook)

I’ve been journaling online in one form or another on the web pretty much ever since I started to use the internet (at age 14?). Back in the day it was straight HTML pages, with p and /p tags, cheesy background wallpapers for your site and the requisite midi file to introduce the user to your personal web space. Then Blogger came around and made things so much simpler: you didn’t have to create each page individually: you’d just have to enter your thoughts into a box and poof! out pops a journal entry! WOW! It was revolutionary for the time! Go 1999! It’s a new millennium, baby!

Anyway, I came across my Blogger blogs the other day after messing around with creating a Google profile. Side note: I’d been adamantly resistant to setting up an “official” Google profile (much like not having a Facebook username), but after talking to one of my friends, I decided to look into it. And there they were: my forgotten Blogger pages, which I haven’t touched in at least five years and which were never made “public”, that Google remembered because they bought Blogger years ago. I came across all my random/ridiculous rants and those cry-faced posts from when I was angst-ridden and lovesick over this guy I was embroiled in a bad romance with. Overall the posts were cogent and filled with emotion and somewhat pathetic youthful attempts at logic, but most of all, I was prolific, writing about everything from music to food to politics to feminism. You couldn’t shut me up! And I thought I was bad now!

Most of all, I can’t believe I wrote some of this crap. I’m still kind of embarrassed about it. -_-

All of this mostly makes me really happy about not being a teenager/young adult in the time of Facebook. I mean, before, you could make a bad decision about something you write online, you could delete it a few days later and none would be the wiser. It wasn’t like people were checking your blog every day – few people were savvy enough to be doing that kind of publishing and even fewer were using RSS to subscribe to your content.  But on Facebook, you push a button and ALL YOUR FRIENDS and their friends see it instantly since everyone’s checking their pages all the time.

Before, you could struggle with growing up on your own time in your own space (relatively), but now everyone lives their social lives out online and if things go bad, EVERYONE knows RIGHT AWAY. It’s like Facebook enables everyone to live their lives in a voluntary fishbowl, like mini-celebrities posing and pouting for their eager paparazzi, their friends, and although it’s kind of fun at first to get all that attention, it can really suck to get burned.

I think that’s why I find all these Facebook privacy stories so fascinating. Here we are, presented with this new technology, but it shapes our social interactions and mores in all these new ways that people are still figuring out. It’s average people trying to establish new romantic relationships in real-life but negotiating how to develop it in virtual life, sibling rivalries that turn ugly in public and making awkward connections with people you’re not really sure you want to associate with online but need to in order to support your professional life, etc. Kind of ties in to the brand of awkward comedy so rampant now – the kind that centers around awkward people, stunted emotional growth and uncomfortable social situations: it’s relatable and popular because most young people today are adapting to a world where the old rules of social interaction don’t really apply anymore, and hell, you might as well laugh about it.