Life Between Lines

 Any time anyone creates a classification system for... literally anything, there will be people who fall awkwardly into the cracks; McCulloch acknowledges this herself when setting up her 5-6 kinds of "internet people." 

Old Internet People

By strictly yearly numbers, I should fall into this category. My family first got a personal computer in 1996, a cast-off from my dad's work as they brought in new machines. It primarily functioned as a toy for us kids; we used it to play MSDOS games and slid in one floppy disk after another. We got our first dial-up connection in 1999; later that year an older neighbor would introduce my brother and I to a fun, brand-new website called Neopets. I remember IRC and MUDs. I was, however, eight. There is a limit to the sorts of thing an eight year old is interested in doing online, and a very significant limit to how many people are happy to interact with an eight year old online. So despite fitting in by a technicality and identifying with a lot of the terms, I'm not really Old Internet, am I? My brother, four years older, was the one who was good at HTML, I could barely slap together text and didn't learn how to code my first website until 2002. I don't talk like them. I only think like them a little. I don't fit. 

Full Internet People

This one would be me. It still fit my age category: I got online in 1999. Except, that's where it falls apart immediately. This was a category for people who got online to talk with people they already knew. I didn't know anyone online! I don't know anyone period! I lived on a farm in rural Alabama and wouldn't have a friend my age until the summer of 2001. Yes, sure, I used AIM and MSN, a lot. To talk to people I'd met on forums or through online games. It wouldn't be for years later that I would use the internet as a tool to talk to my real life friends, because it wouldn't be for years that I had real life friends, let alone ones who had access to AIM. I was ahead of the technological curve, especially for my area. How many farms do you imagine had dial-up in 1999? My experience--the iconic Neopets experience mentioned on page 79--is something of an afterthought. Whereas the book indicates how Full Internet People began to embrace Facebook, I fell in with my Old Internet friends, unnerved by the break in the internet "laws" of never, ever revealing your personal details. 

The Inbetween

I am, perhaps, a very young old internet person. There weren't a lot of tech-savvy, extremely bored 8 year olds wandering around on the internet in 1999. There were a lot more a few years later, as the growth of Neopets and other similar pet sites would argue, but that demographic is covered later, in the Full group, which feels a bit odd and uncomfortable to the me who took pride in my HTML websites, carefully put together minimalist links and images to load fast on a shitty dial-up connection, filled with links to let you navigate the obtuse Neopets user interface quickly and without having to load a dozen image-filled pages. I never had MySpace. I never had Facebook. I got Twitter for work three years ago. Who are these social butterflies? 

To make things worse, my job is online now. My friends and colleagues are online. Most of my closest friends to this day are pulled from the pool of utter strangers I met on forums when we were all kids. And, at first because of reasons of rural isolation, and later for reasons of disability, it behooved me to stay on top of what "the kids" were doing, adapting to every new technology as it came along, from MSN to Skype to Discord to LINE, picking up a Tumblr as a way of meeting other young queers as early as 2008. The social importance of the internet discussed in "Post Internet People" feels strikingly important. And now I'm also interacting with teenagers every day. Let's just say that my internet accent is... broad and difficult to categorize. I have used all the lols. My lols have evolved over time. What am I.

I thought for sure there was a flaw in the reasoning, and that more people would fall into McCulloch's gaps, so I interviewed friends and family of a variety of ages. Nope! I was totally wrong! Almost all of them fit extremely neatly into one of her categories. Her methodology wasn't flawed; I was just weird. I was an outlier and should not have been counted. But I do wonder just how common this is in people with my very specific demographic. A father in a tech-related field allowed me to get online uncommonly early for a child. Extreme isolation left me with an early internet for a socialization hunting ground. But moreover, I was queer in Alabama in the 00s. Not a good time or place to be queer! My chances of meeting like-minded individuals even after I began attending real school--a private and extremely controlling Christian school--were essentially nil. That left the internet. And what of disability? After increasing illness left me unable to attend school normally or go out with my peers, what did that leave but the internet? I wouldn't be surprised if other people with even ONE of these demographics, let alone all four, found themselves falling awkwardly into the gaps of two or more categories.