AOL, Geocities, and Message Boards: A Brief History of Becoming Human Online
What it meant to grow up as a lurker on the information superhighway
In an excerpt from Lurking, a history of being a user online, Joanne McNeil remembers the profound impact of coming of age in the small communities forged on the early internet.
“Information Superhighway” once had a valence of provocative optimism, sort of like “Green New Deal” does today. It was an idealistic term, glamorizing the “highway,” an American romance, the physical expression of ambition — the texture, plotting, and substance extending to the near future. Forget the gridlock; online was endless on-ramps.
The cacophony of a 2400-baud modem announced my passage to a secret world. It felt like my spirit traveled through the wires, dialing, dinging, convulsing, and thrashing its way to a mind-meld connection with my invisible friends. The internet was an alternate vector for expression, at a time when I felt I had no connection to the physical world, just a body in space with little to say. I was shy, and in any previous era, I might have spent my teen years as a shut-in, totally bored and completely lonely. Maybe I wasted the years just the same, but the internet was more than civilization had ever offered youth with my privilege and spare time…
