Anniee's Weblog

I was a teenager when I had my first experience with social networking so I was more interested in how to cause trouble than how to “connect with my community”. Like Nicole mentioned in her blog, I found an AOL screenname. My mom helped me create my first one, just part of my name; and then I got a different ‘cooler’ one with my friends so I could do the sneaky stuff. Then we set to work lurking in inappropriate chatrooms or searching for our crushes on-line.
The interesting thing about chat-rooms, email, and, more recently, the explosion of social networking sites is what different people we all become. When I was fifteen, I wasn’t shy, but I wasn’t going out of my way to cause reactions from people and I wasn’t a spiteful or rebellious child, I don’t think. Neither were my friends. Yet online, in these chatrooms, we would lie, say rude things or provacative things (this is before internet predator was a phrase) just to see what the person on the other end would say. I remember trying to convince some boy in a sports chatroom that claimed he was fifteen and claimed he lived in Texas that my friend and I were Troy Aikman’s secret illegitimate twin daughters for like four hours. We created a different identity to contact a popular boy and try to get dirt about who he liked. This was the kind of mischief we would have never dreamed about carrying out in person.
As I got older, I had friends who were dumped by email or who had huge blowout fights with other friends over IM. What is it about typing that made us say things we wouldn’t utter in the flesh? Perhaps it was not having to be face to face with the person or maybe the time delay urged us to overthink our friend’s comments. Maybe we just weren’t used to seeing what we said to each other in print and we didn’t know how to take it. It could have been the newness of being able to create an image of yourself that less people could see through. Maybe, still, it was the friends sitting around us egging us on and telling us what to say next to the boy in our Yearbook Class or the girl we thought may have glared at us at lunch. I wish there was a Wonder Years episode that discussed virtual community so that Kevin Arnold’s older voice could tell me what it all meant. And yet, maybe the mystery of our virtual vs. actual identities is one that even a Daniel Stern voiceover couldn’t wrap up in 23 minutes.