Social media can be a wonderful thing.
It connects you to people you might not otherwise ever speak to.
It introduces you to things that you wouldn't know about otherwise.
It allows a level of interaction that is sometimes easier for people to accept and use. Some people just aren't good at face to face interactions and social media opens up avenues of communication and expression that weren't there before.
Social media can be an awful thing.
It allows people to mercilessly rip you to shreds behind the shroud of a computer/tablet/phone screen anonymously without fear of repercussion.
It helps perpetuate hateful messages that can destroy even the strongest of individuals.
It empowers people to act in ways they wouldn't dare act if the interaction took place outside in the actual world.
When used properly and effectively, social media can propel you to places you could only imagine. Without social media, it's highly doubtful that some of the internet sensations would ever be known. Between Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and other venues, there are more ways than ever to be heard, seen, and understood.
There are also more ways for you to be exposed in a variety of ways to levels that hurt, sometimes even kill.
It's not all doom and gloom though. I've generally had positive experiences on social media, and typically it's easy to block and/or report someone who's not playing nice. Very little usually comes of it, but the person is no longer annoying me and I feel better about the situation.
Then again, I have a fraction of the following on social media as some. I have just over 600 followers on Twitter, 70 friends on my actual Facebook page, and only 5 likes on my gaming channel's page. My reach is limited at best, so the potential for scornful comments and attacks is slim.
Those with tens of thousands of followers/subscribers/likes will likely deal with far more devious situations, especially if the person/page partakes in giveaways.
More on that at a later point (if I remember).
WORD OF ADVICE - this is going to be a multi-part series. You've been warned!
The internet is a FAR different place today than it was when I first began signing on with America Online in the late 90's. The culture is different, the browsing experience is different, and the internet is a multimedia machine compared to how it operated back when I first was signing on.
Back then, the social experience involved chat rooms, e-mail, and eventually instant messenger services. Of course, much of the conversations were pointless and most chat rooms operated under the A/S/L principle (age/sex/location for those unfamiliar with late 90's/early 2000's lingo). In essence, most teens were looking for the opposite sex and there was no shame in it.
You operated mostly blind back then though. Pictures weren't easy to get on the internet then and even when they did get on there, it took a LONG time for the picture to download (remember, this was before broadband existed). You had to take people for their word on their appearance, and depending on how active your imagination worked determined what "5'2", blonde hair, blue eyes" looked like.
Instant messengers were the precursors to text messaging when you think about it. While not mobile, it allowed you to talk to virtually anyone and get an immediate response (at least as long as they were at their computer). Of course, it became a bit cumbersome if you had multiple conversations going on, but it had advantages over e-mail and didn't take long to become extremely popular.
Even as recently as 5-6 years ago, I had an instant messenger installed on my computer to maintain conversations with people I had met on the internet in various forms. You still have reminders of instant messaging in various web sites and applications, but text messaging and other forms of social media have since replaced instant messengers.
As time went on and internet speeds started to get faster, more entertainment options opened up for people online. I feel that when people started to realize they didn't need AOL to go online, things started to open up more. My mom was one of the early adopters of alternative internet access, going with a company called Exchange Net for a while. It was nice to be able to use a regular web browser and not be "confined" to the AOL model of searching the internet.
It was around this point when I decided to learn HTML. There had been a guy going around the AOL chat rooms offering to build simple web sites for people and I became intensely curious about how he had done it. He was nice enough to show me the code and I ended up spending months learning as much as I could about HTML so I could make my own site.
After we had moved on from AOL, I came across a site called "Geocities." I was interested because it had large storage (at the time, 15mb was fairly substantial) and was free. You just had to pick a "city" that was appropriate for your site and you could use a simple or advanced editor to put your content up. If you want a good laugh, the site is still "available" as it was archived by Oocities. You can find it here.
At one point I had two sites up. I had a fan site for the show Mystery Science Theater 3000 (former cast members now operate Rifftrax), plus my own personal blog, which is mentioned above. It was overly ambitious for me to have one, much less two, sites, but I attempted to do so back then. I quickly realized I was NEVER going to be able to do a proper fan site, so I ditched it after a while and focused on a single site.
It's remarkable to me how much work I initially put into the site, but like most things I do, it trails off after a while and updates become more sporadic. But if you want a 10 year look into my mind from 1997-2007, it's a good place to check out, even if it is cringe-worthy for me personally.
Back then, it was exciting to be able to build my own site and see my work sitting on the internet. It was exciting to create something and see it sitting, waiting for people to see. It was a precursor to my video creation and live-streaming, but on a MUCH smaller scale.
Coming next: why I ended up abandoning the web site and beginnings of social media as we know it today.
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