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January 26, 2025

A Brief History of my Internet Journey

It all began when I was given a Nintendo DS when I was perhaps around 2 years old. That sounds really young and I'm not actually sure that's how old I was but it seems about right. The only way I could use the internet was through PictoChat, though, and I never really figured out how to use it. My first real internet experiences were when I created an account on Roblox with my older brother and played games with eachother like "Build to Survive the Zombies" and "Make a Cake And Feed the Giant Noob" and that one game with the different colored towers competing to destroy eachother. I remember my username was Awesomecake123 or something like that, and I don't think I understood the avatar feature, because I rocked the default guest avatar--plus a party hat that my brother showed me how to wear. My overall fascination with video games was heavily influenced by my older brother, who is four years older than me. I don't know if I would have ever really been interested in them if it weren't for him. We played a lot of Minecraft, Terraria, and Call of Duty Zombies together.

I started to form my own interests when I was in the third or fourth grade when my best friend had introduced the Warrior Cats book series to me, a book series that would end up directing the entire course of my childhood. Shortly after, I downloaded the evil, evil app called Amino on my dads phone, because I didn't have one of my own yet. Amino was a place where you could join communities based on fandoms you were involved in. For me of course, that was the Warrior Cats fandom. I spent the rest of my elementary school days posting art and writing stories of my fan characters from Warrior Cats with my best friend. Fortunately, I wasn't all that interested in the roleplay aspect of the Warrior Cats fandom. It was there where my best friend met a lot of creepy people that I was very lucky to avoid.

When I was in the 5th grade, I downloaded Discord, where I joined a few Warrior Cats fan servers and made a few friends. Again, I was very lucky not to run into any users with malicious intent in speaking to me. I was at least a little bit smart, I never showed my face online, and never gave out any personal information. I did make some stupid decisions, like lying about my age. Well, I shouldn't have been on the internet at the age of 11 anyway. It's not exactly a safe place for an unsupervised child!

Over the course of my middle school years, half of which were during Covid Lockdown, I found myself entangled with several different online friend groups. We mainly bonded over our love for Minecraft, which we dedicated many hours of our time to. I still miss the lockdown days of SMPS and Hypixel games. I even miss the Minecraft Youtuber hype, just a little bit. There was a crazy time where I got involved with that Minecraft animation YouTuber, DooferDoodles. I stupidly offered to host their Minecraft server because I was young and thought internet celebrities were super cool and wanted to be friends with them. So for $5.00 a month, for many months, I got the attention of a famous person. I was 12 or 13 at this time, and now I look back and put myself in DooferDoodles shoes and wonder why they would ever let a young child pay for their Minecraft server??? Long story short: I made them quit Youtube and I'm pretty sure they're gone forever... Whoops!

8th grade was the last time I ever made online friends. I was just so sick of them. Not that it was always their fault--I was an asshole too! But to me, online friends are so unfulfilling and it feels like you never really know who they are. My only exception is a friend I met from my Minecraft days who I still talk to today. We even met in person one time! In my experience, it's only possible to keep online friends if you either don't have or don't like your friends in real life. I did meet some people on Valorant later on, but their friendships were short-lived and surface-level.

I now spend my time on the internet more wisely; I try not to spend hours scrolling on instagram reels and the like. I don't use social media much at all except to keep in touch with people. There was even a point where I swapped my IPhone for a flip phone and used only that for a few months. It was a really nice experience (although sometimes frustrating) that I would love to go back to. I only made the switch back because I would be leaving for Germany soon and a flip phone wouldn't have much use there.

My take-aways from my internet journey would be that I strongly regret having unsupervised access to it. I know that my parents also regret this, as I've talked to them about it and their reason was they thought I was smart enough to keep myself safe. True, I didn't get my house raided and I didn't get kidnapped by meeting up with a stranger in person, but I saw a lot of content that was inappropriate for a young kid to be seeing that can never be erased from my mind. I also think it isolated me from my real-life peers. I thought I was better because I knew about more things than others and it made me pretty insufferable to be around.

It's hard to see young children on social media, because it reminds me of my younger self and I worry for them. I also see kids upset at their parents for putting restrictions on their devices, or not giving them devices at all. While it's important to teach our children about technology to ensure their independance in a technology-reliant world, it's also our job to protect them from certain parts of it before they are old enough to understand it and use it safely.

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