Among this week's readings, the one that really grabbed my attention was Katie Tarbox's book A Girl's Life Online. It was such a fast and enjoyable read. It was also a read that helped me reflect on how much the internet has really changed over the years. Katie might be about 5 years older than me, but we are close enough in age to know what the internet was like in its beginning stages. My family hooked up to the internet when I was about 13 or 14 years-old. Like Katie and her family, we followed the AOL free internet trial, which led us to join their service. My earliest memories of using the internet deal with using AOL's famous chatrooms. When I wasn't using them to talk to friends, I was using them to meet like-minded strangers online. My teeny-bopper, pop princess, 13 year-old self was a self-professed Backstreet Boys fangirl. When I wasn't in a BSB chatroom discussing how awesome they were, I was in the N*SYNC chatrooms bad-mouthing every N*SYNC fan in there. Some nights though brought me to the same teen chatrooms that led Katie to meeting "Mark". I will always remember one moment when I met a guy online. We exchanged our ASL (age, sex, location) and began talking about small things. He then asked me for a picture of me. My naive self began rumaging through my house for my cheap digital camera that my grandparents gave me. I'm very glad I never found that camera. For all I know that "teen" could have been another predator like "Mark".
During those years, many people saw the internet as being harmless to youth. What harm could be done to someone when they were seperated from others by a computer screen and an unknown length of cyber space between them? My parents tried to keep a watchful eye, but once they went to bed the internet was free game to me and my siblings. Adults in this day and age are aware of the dangers of the internet. Those with children do their best to place the necessary rules and precautions in order to protect their children. It took horrible events, such as the one that Katie Tarbox went through, in order to bring awareness about the harms of the internet to individuals.
I really admire Katie Tarbox for writing a very honest look into how one innocent night spent in an online chatroom brought her so much pain and strife for many years. Although the events she went through happened at a very young age in the life of the internet, there are still girls in the world today that go through the same things that Katie did. I highly recommend this book to any teenage girl out there. Especially in today's world that revolves around the use of the internet so much.
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