Now, you may say, "C'mon, this is just dishonest. Why would you even post something online if you don't want others to see it? Surely, if you genuinely didn't care you'd just keep it private."
And to some extent you'd be right. There's always a self-awareness, along with an innate desire for attention and success, that isn't ever truly absent. Back in the long, long ago things really were quite different though.
When I First Found The Internet
To give an example, I remember the first time I ever came across a blog. I was about nineteen/twenty years old, and at the time I'd never really even used the internet. This was around the year 2000. I vaguely knew what it was, but just didn't care. Music was the main thing I was interested in. So in my head the internet was just a big shared encyclopedia or phone book full of information, that you could access via a computer. I didn't appreciate the impact it was having or was going to have.
I can't remember if we had internet access back at home at that point, but if we did it was slow and painfully boring to use, so I rarely if ever did. I remember my dad being much more interested in it than I was back then. That's how behind the curve I was. I recall him telling me that we had it at some point around the turn of the century, but again, I just didn't care.
Anyway, the first time I remember using an internet connection that wasn't painfully slow was at college. The college I went to had a brand new library installed, complete with an array of new computers, and it had access to the "World Wide Web". That was, like, the big thing. As I didn't care I only originally used it out of boredom. I'd love to look back and say I appreciated the importance of it, but I just didn't. I remember sitting in the library in between lessons, completely bored out of my skull. Occasionally I'd type something into the search bar, like I was idly flicking through a book or magazine in a waiting room. The novelty quickly wearing off each time after a few half-hearted searches.
Then, one day, I randomly typed something into the search bar and up popped a person's blog. Of course, I had zero idea what a blog actually was back then. So initially it was just completely odd to me that someone had a personal diary online. I'm pretty certain the phrase I typed in was "Indie Music Is Dead." (I was obviously pretty unimpressed by the new music that was coming out at the time too.) The particular blog post that popped up had the exact same wording for its title. However, it wasn't quite the same topic I had in mind. It was an American blog (naturally, as America was so much ahead of the UK in regards internet use at the time). By a female teenage student. The initial post was vaguely about guitar music I seem to remember, but the rest of the blog posts were just about her life and her thoughts. Posts about what had happened in her maths lesson. Or how well her trumpet practice was going.
She was kind of a Lisa Simpson type American student. She cared about getting good grades. That type of person. I'm sure on some level she understood that having an online blog would garner views and attention, but she wasn't doing it for the clicks. That wasn't really the thing back then. There weren't even any pictures of her on the blog. The few pictures there were being related to the things she was doing, not pictures of herself. Again, like Lisa Simpson, she was the sort of girl that would've had a journal or diary anyway. In the days before the internet. Now the internet had came along she just did it online, because she could, and probably partly because she had a bit of an oddball interest in computers and such like. In fact, I remember being slightly baffled at the time that a teenage girl could even make such a website. I remember thinking, "Is she some type of computer programming whizz-kid? How has she even done this??" Like she was some high-achieving Mensa student or something.
Either way, it was all odd enough to catch my attention, and it was interesting seeing a person in another country going about their life. Seeing what American school or college was like first-hand, not just through a TV show. We take it for granted now, but back then America was much more of a foreign country. It really was The Simpsons to me.
That was the first interesting thing I ever saw online and it stuck with me. At the time I wasn't sure if it was good, bad or just plain pointless, but it obviously grabbed my curiosity. I remember occasionally revisiting the blog when I was in the college library. I can recall the phrase I typed so well because that was the only way I knew how to find it.
Now and again I'm reminded of it, and I'm always struck by how different things were to how they are now. It reminds me that the internet is a public space, much a like a public park. It's a place where we can just do stuff, because we want to. It doesn't have to be a marketplace where humans desperately sell themselves. It doesn't have to matter whether other people notice what we do, but at the same time, good things can arise when that unintentionally happens.
It's like how it can be nice to see a person sat reading a book in the park. It might even inspire you to do the same thing yourself. However, if the person is deliberately sat there with a book hoping to get noticed it's not really the same. It has to be genuine to make those genuinely nice moments.
Tomorrow: Part II (..Tony Blair gets a mention).
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