Digital Autobiography

I believe that my experiences with technology came several years later than the experiences of many of the girls who I have met in college. My parents had always had a computer while I was growing up, from their very first Macintosh purchased while living overseas, to the modern Dell desktop which sits in my mother’s office today. I generally ignored this strange piece of technology in favor of playing outside with my friends, bedroom dancing, and watching cartoons on T.V. It was not until I moved back to the United States at the age of eight that I had ever laid hands on a computer.

When I was in grade school, we were allotted a few hours of computer lab time a week, which rotated around other elective classes: art, P.E., drama, etc. Computer time wasn’t my favorite (art was) but it wasn’t my least favorite either. It was during this forty five minute interval that I discovered the great redeemer of boredom that was “The Oregon Trail.” The Oregon Trail was, and continues to be, a favorite of Generation Y adults such as myself for several reasons. For one, it was funny – you could name your characters after your friends and laugh as they came down with typhoid or yellow fever, diseases unheard of by us middleclass American kids. Secondly, it was hard, like… nearly impossible… to beat.
I’m pretty sure whoever designed it made it impossible so that kids could play several hours a week for an entire school year and never beat the game, thereby saving teachers the aggravation of having to create an entirely new activity for half of their computer class. Other popular games included Number Crunchers and, for the more advanced, Dune (although I don’t think we ever played this one at school). I primarily saw computers as a way to waste time in the same sense as worksheets or “reading time,” were devised to keep students busy while teachers held conferences or graded papers. However, with the rise in popularity of the internet and my graduation to high school, my experiences with computers were about to broaden significantly.

When I was thirteen, a girl named Katie moved in next door to my parent’s house. She was a couple years older than me, already wearing make-up, hanging out with boys, and of course chatting online with strangers. To say she was a bad influence would be an understatement. Both of our parents worked so every day after school, we would go to her house, dump our bags at the door, and use AOL dial up to get online and hang out in chat rooms. I guess we both liked the attention that we thought we were getting from boys because we had screen names like “Shorty2Fly4U” and we would enter into a chat with our “a.s.l.” (Age, sex, location). Sometimes we would lie and say we were sixteen, or that we lived in California, or make up other fantasy lives just for fun. Never once did I consider meeting someone from one of these chats but I’m fairly sure Katie had and did more than once. In retrospect, I think the time spent with Katie those two years was something of a loss of innocence for me because prior to AOL chat I’d never seen a penis, much less had any kind of real-life sexual encounter. I only tried chatting once at my parent’s house and after giving out the family e-mail address to a person who I thought was a boy my age our inbox was spammed with an influx of porn sites and viruses. My mother told me to never use chat sites again, explaining that older men use them to prey on young girls. Ironically, I’d never even considered that I might be talking to a middle aged pervert! But the porn invasion was enough to scare me away from the internet until it became crucial to my academic life.

When I was fifteen, my parents divorced and my brother and I moved with my mom from Virginia to Florida. I arrived at Oviedo High School in March of 2001 and went from being confident and popular, to shy and alone in just a week’s time. I didn’t understand much of the curriculum and failed my favorite subjects. I was ignored by my teachers and peers. I became extremely depressed and continued to struggle with these issues of loneliness and abandonment even into my adult life. Back then, it was the internet that saved me from the misery of not fitting in by introducing me to the central Florida rave scene.

Ravers are not much different than punks. Both feel an alienation from mainstream culture, anger towards parents and teachers who’ve let them down in one way or another, and a DIY attitude towards identity formation. My particular subculture operated primarily through the internet via e-mail messages and forums. Mass e-mails would be sent out and forwarded by members alerting others to the location of the rave. We’d change the names of the forums regularly to avoid attention from law enforcement and connect with each other using aliases. All night dance parties had been deemed illegal by the “Rave Act of 2002” which you can read about here if you’re interested http://emdef.org/s226/. Sometimes you’d meet someone at a rave and know them for several months or even years only by their alias. This was a wonderful, eye-opening, mind-expanding time for me. I made some amazing friends and don’t regret a single minute I spent “partying.” This community of misfits literally saved my life.



So, I guess there are two things that I’ve learned here from recollecting my own history of digital literacy, the first and most important being that identity is something that is always evolving and being influenced by time, people, and place, and the second that the internet has the ability to open doors for people who are otherwise shut out from society. Fortunately, the identity I created during those difficult high school years via forums was genuine and transpired into real life friendships and experiences. Though my rave years are long behind me, I continue to represent myself online as an actual person via facebook, forums, twitter, and now, blogs. A combination of safety and honesty makes the internet a viable medium of identity formation for me and women worldwide and I sincerely hope that young girls receive the necessary education to navigate the internet to their advantage.