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dolorosa_12This is my second time taking a December talking meme prompt and using it for a Friday open thread. Today's prompt comes from thatjustwontbreak and is: talk about your earliest experiences using the internet and how it felt to you.
I grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s, in the time period in which internet for personal use by the general public was in its early stages of moving into ubiquity. This was the days of dial-up, massive desktop PCs, and, if you were lucky, a single, shared desktop computer in your family's house, mainly used for word processing, which would disconnect from the internet every time someone called your landline phone (which happened frequently). Most of the architecture of today's internet didn't exist: no Youtube, no Wikipedia — no Google, even! I was not an early adopter, and apart from setting up email addresses (one of which, set up when I was fourteen years old, I continue to use to this day), I basically didn't use the internet at all in my adolescence. If we talk about 'using the internet' in this time, I would have to describe the experience as slow, frustrating, and uninteresting to me in general. I was aware of contemporaneous online fandom in a very vague way due to friends at school (there was a girl at my school who earned money by drawing digital art of anime characters on commission, and I also remember another friend coming to me at one point and saying, in scandalised tones, that 'there are people on the internet who write stories about Harry Potter characters, and in some of those stories Harry and Draco are gay and in a relationship with each other!!!!!!!') but none of this was of the slightest interest to me.
Obviously when I was an undergrad I had a university email address and used the internet a bit for research, but for the most part I still had a pretty analogue life: I read print books both for study and pleasure, I typed up my assignments and the newspaper book reviews I was paid to write, but both were then printed to be assessed by my tutors or in newspaper form, and my entire social life (such as it was; I had situational depression for my entire undergrad) was in person with people I knew from school and university. I got a Livejournal account in those days because all my school friends who'd stayed in Canberra did, and we treated it as a way to stay in touch.
So I prefer to describe my 'first time using the internet' as when, in an act of desperation in the year after I graduated from undergrad with even worse depression, I typed 'His Dark Materials fansite' into Google, the first hit was BridgetotheStars.net, and I grasped at it like a drowning woman with a life raft. Although it would take moving to the UK to shake off the mental darkness (and that was another two years away), that forum, and the people who inhabited it were a lifeline, and there were many days where the only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that I would be able to spend the evening chatting with them in our IRC channel.
There was only one other Australian in the community, but amusingly we figured out that he lived half an hour's walk away from me, went to the same high school I had attended (and had attended the same primary school with the same Year Six teacher, and his Year Six class had performed the same play that my Year Six class had written seven years earlier; we realised all this because we had both been rhapsodising in a forum thread about Victor Kelleher books and a specific Year Six teacher who had introduced us to them), and would go on to move to the UK for postgraduate study, and, like me, settle down here. The rest of the community was evenly split between the UK, the US and Canada, with occasional Icelanders, Irish people, Finnish people, etc, and for those first two years — other than![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
lowercasename, my fellow Canberran — I obviously only spoke to them online, although I've met pretty much all of them in person by now. Every time I'm in their parts of the world, or they're in mine, we catch up. It's delightful.
There are things I would do (and have done) differently in subsequent online communities — it was a particularly intense time in all our lives, and that intensity, and the at times extreme emotional vulnerability it sparked led to a community in which oversharing, complete disregard of the risks of sharing personally identifying information, and being very comfortable sharing all the deeply personal ways in which we were each vulnerable was something I look back on with a mixture of horror, and relief that every single one of us proved to be trustworthy while having all that in our hands — but it still remains my absolute gold standard for online fannish community, and I feel immensely grateful that I stumbled on it in a period of my life when I so badly needed exactly what it gave me.
In short, when you ask me what my earliest experiences of using the internet felt like, my answer is: like a soft place to fall, like home. Like a hand reaching out to save me.
I imagine it won't be as ... so much as all that, but what about you? How do you define your first time using the internet, and what did it feel like?
thatjustwontbreak and is: talk about your earliest experiences using the internet and how it felt to you.I grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s, in the time period in which internet for personal use by the general public was in its early stages of moving into ubiquity. This was the days of dial-up, massive desktop PCs, and, if you were lucky, a single, shared desktop computer in your family's house, mainly used for word processing, which would disconnect from the internet every time someone called your landline phone (which happened frequently). Most of the architecture of today's internet didn't exist: no Youtube, no Wikipedia — no Google, even! I was not an early adopter, and apart from setting up email addresses (one of which, set up when I was fourteen years old, I continue to use to this day), I basically didn't use the internet at all in my adolescence. If we talk about 'using the internet' in this time, I would have to describe the experience as slow, frustrating, and uninteresting to me in general. I was aware of contemporaneous online fandom in a very vague way due to friends at school (there was a girl at my school who earned money by drawing digital art of anime characters on commission, and I also remember another friend coming to me at one point and saying, in scandalised tones, that 'there are people on the internet who write stories about Harry Potter characters, and in some of those stories Harry and Draco are gay and in a relationship with each other!!!!!!!') but none of this was of the slightest interest to me.
Obviously when I was an undergrad I had a university email address and used the internet a bit for research, but for the most part I still had a pretty analogue life: I read print books both for study and pleasure, I typed up my assignments and the newspaper book reviews I was paid to write, but both were then printed to be assessed by my tutors or in newspaper form, and my entire social life (such as it was; I had situational depression for my entire undergrad) was in person with people I knew from school and university. I got a Livejournal account in those days because all my school friends who'd stayed in Canberra did, and we treated it as a way to stay in touch.
So I prefer to describe my 'first time using the internet' as when, in an act of desperation in the year after I graduated from undergrad with even worse depression, I typed 'His Dark Materials fansite' into Google, the first hit was BridgetotheStars.net, and I grasped at it like a drowning woman with a life raft. Although it would take moving to the UK to shake off the mental darkness (and that was another two years away), that forum, and the people who inhabited it were a lifeline, and there were many days where the only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that I would be able to spend the evening chatting with them in our IRC channel.
There was only one other Australian in the community, but amusingly we figured out that he lived half an hour's walk away from me, went to the same high school I had attended (and had attended the same primary school with the same Year Six teacher, and his Year Six class had performed the same play that my Year Six class had written seven years earlier; we realised all this because we had both been rhapsodising in a forum thread about Victor Kelleher books and a specific Year Six teacher who had introduced us to them), and would go on to move to the UK for postgraduate study, and, like me, settle down here. The rest of the community was evenly split between the UK, the US and Canada, with occasional Icelanders, Irish people, Finnish people, etc, and for those first two years — other than
lowercasename, my fellow Canberran — I obviously only spoke to them online, although I've met pretty much all of them in person by now. Every time I'm in their parts of the world, or they're in mine, we catch up. It's delightful. There are things I would do (and have done) differently in subsequent online communities — it was a particularly intense time in all our lives, and that intensity, and the at times extreme emotional vulnerability it sparked led to a community in which oversharing, complete disregard of the risks of sharing personally identifying information, and being very comfortable sharing all the deeply personal ways in which we were each vulnerable was something I look back on with a mixture of horror, and relief that every single one of us proved to be trustworthy while having all that in our hands — but it still remains my absolute gold standard for online fannish community, and I feel immensely grateful that I stumbled on it in a period of my life when I so badly needed exactly what it gave me.
In short, when you ask me what my earliest experiences of using the internet felt like, my answer is: like a soft place to fall, like home. Like a hand reaching out to save me.
I imagine it won't be as ... so much as all that, but what about you? How do you define your first time using the internet, and what did it feel like?
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Date: 2025-12-12 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 09:46 pm (UTC)We had internet access at home by the time I was ten or eleven, but I didn't really get into fannish spaces until high school. I was one of the people in the Harry Potter fandom, but it regrettably took me a long time to realize the Harry/Draco fics were actually 100% serious. The idea of them being together just seemed so ridiculous to me, you know? I actually feel bad about that now. I was quite snooty about it. Then a few of my friends got into H/D, and it became easier and easier for me to understand, although it's still not my cuppa. (If I were still in the fandom, anyway.)
In general, I think there was a weird dissonance between the idea of doing fandom to celebrate the canon universe, and writing fanfic almost to subvert canon. I'm not saying you can't do both, but in many of the circles I ended up in, it was very much the former as opposed to the latter. So that didn't help. I was in for a shock when I tried other fandoms, and realized most people shipped things I wouldn't have personally gone for. I still tend to go for canon ships, though not always.
(Honestly, in general, the Harry Potter fandom was unusual in... so many ways.)
I certainly relate to the mental health aspect. In some ways, this meant I wasn't always on my best behavior; in others, it allowed me to build friendships I had trouble forming IRL.
I never saw the internet exploding the way it has. I remember thinking at some point that we might just get a new version of the internet, the way we went from typewriters to computers. I envisioned talking to my friends on a TV screen or something.
I actually quite dislike many aspects of the modern internet. At the very least, I wish there were still independently run websites and forums, or more of them. DW may be one of the few websites that has its users' interests at heart, and understands precisely why the website is used. I wish there were more of that than *gestures* all this.
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Date: 2025-12-13 02:41 pm (UTC)That split between canon vs non-canon fans is so weird to me, though! Most big fandoms I'm aware of often have a split between competing ships, but not because one ship is canon and the other isn't (although of course part of the competition may involve hoping one's preferred ship becomes canon at some later point).
I agree with you about the modern internet. The main aspects I dislike are its ubiquity and ease of use: everyone's in the same spaces, and it's really easy to participate passively in those spaces. That means a bunch of people with very different values and social norms are crowded in the one space, and if they see something that makes them fly off the handle, it's really easy to jump in and cause tension. It sounds counterintuitive, but I much prefer internet spaces that have a slightly higher barrier to entry (like Dreamwidth, and old school forums) with a much smaller user base. I also prefer what I call the 'do it yourself' internet, rather than everything being owned by a small handful of big tech companies who just want to make huge amounts of money.
As an aside, I did mean to leave a prompt for your own December talking meme, but I saw it too late and was worried jumping in with a prompt halfway through December wouldn't be well received. But do let me know if you're still interested in further prompts.
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Date: 2025-12-13 02:47 pm (UTC)I'm on my way out the door, so will respond to the rest of your comment later.
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Date: 2025-12-14 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-13 11:30 am (UTC)I remember Geocities sites. I might have had one of my own.
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Date: 2025-12-13 02:48 pm (UTC)Harry Potter seems to have been a common theme in a lot of people's early experiences of online fandom — it really was such a behemoth, and sparked such varied fic, but I'm sorry the stuff you encountered was so unsettling. Other than what I described in my post, the existence of its online fandom completely passed me by — my own engagement with the books was solely in-person discussions and speculation about future plot developments with school friends, plus the last two books came out when I was a professional newspaper book reviewer so I wrote paid reviews and articles about them. It's so awful how something that was — for better or worse — so formative for so many people of overlapping generations has become so retrospectively tarnished by its author's reprehensible views and cruel behaviour.
I'm glad the internet was there for you when you needed it at such a hard time, and helped you come out the other side of it.
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Date: 2025-12-13 05:30 pm (UTC)I can definitely understand how some people of my generation have difficulty letting HP go, since it was such a big part of our youth - but I just can't stomach it any more, and it does surprise me that there are people who can still engage with it without a sour taste in their mouths.
♥
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Date: 2025-12-13 06:11 pm (UTC)I agree 100 per cent. I think there are genuinely some people who really do not know, but those who do know, and choose to let it slide always shock me.
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Date: 2025-12-13 01:30 am (UTC)By the time I was out of the army, I was actively browsing some forums, but fandom, outside of the alt.fan sites didn't impact me until I had lost my primary partner of a decade. In 2005, Jane Davitt pointed me at yahoo groups, I found Smittywing and she pointed me at Livejournal. I have been chronically online, as they say, since then.
So my first experience is a bit like yours: somewhere I could fall, be picked back up, dusted off, and TAUGHT how to survive better than I'd been managing while also feeding a deep need for kindred spirits.
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Date: 2025-12-13 02:49 pm (UTC)This is a beautiful way of putting it. I'm glad it's been there for you through such difficult times, and for so long.
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Date: 2025-12-13 03:30 am (UTC)A couple of years later, in what must have been grade seven, things had progressed enough that the school had an internet-equipped computer lab. We used it to do research for our science fair projects, and I remember using some combination of lycos and webcrawler to very, VERY slowly search for information, of which I found very little. I distinctly remember thinking to myself that this whole internet thing obviously wasn't going to amount to much!
A few years after that, I think around grade ten, I found theonering.net while searching for information about the filming of the Lord of the Rings movies, and I was a dedicated lurker there and on ardalambion.net for a few years. Then I went to university and had my own computer and internet connection for the first time, and whoa! TORn had fanfiction by then, and I and my roommate followed the Very Secret Diaries back to livejournal, and thence into Harry Potter fandom, and here I am, several fandoms and twenty-three years later!
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Date: 2025-12-13 02:53 pm (UTC)That's amazing! How far we have come, and what a thing to have experienced!
I have a similar memory of doing rudimentary searches on a pre-Google search engine for school work, and finding the results to be unusable (basically a mixture of obvious amateurs and creepy neo-Nazi websites) — I think the teacher who'd set us to searching had deliberately orchestrated this exercise to show us how unreliable internet search results were compared to library books. Again, an incredible thing to look back on.
Lord of the Rings and/or Harry Potter seems to be a common starting point for a lot of people, and I love that you're still here, twenty-three years after you first took the plunge.
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Date: 2025-12-13 07:09 am (UTC)A school project in what must have been fourth grade (age 9-10), where we needed to use GOOGLE (Just the search bar and "I'm Feeling Lucky"!) to research, well, the California missions and make a powerpoint about them. Not any of that nasty stuff. More like, in a truly Meg Murray way, their primary agricultural products. I remember mostly the astonishing ability to find clip art and put it on slides.
IMing my cool older cousin on AIM and being sooooo amazed that you could do this! Setting aside time to talk with her just like it was a phone call. She'd share precisely the music you'd expect of the era: early Panic! At the Disco, HelloGoodbye, Yellowcard. Definitely torrented, in hindsight, lol. It absolutely cemented my sense of her as just the cutting edge of teen glamor, lol. She knew how to IM!
And, of course, the fact that my mom had an LJ, the non-fannish parts of which my sibling and I knew about. I have, shall we say, a complicated relationship to my mom's LJ, but I did love this one woman --wendylady? something like that-- who did long, image-heavy fashion posts about red carpets and such. My mom and I would go through those posts together and leave long comments with our thoughts on each dress. She was ENGLISH and that was very exotic to me, to "talk" with a grownup who lived so far away.
So yes. Connection and family and historical revisionism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Still kind of the best and worst of those worlds.
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Date: 2025-12-13 03:01 pm (UTC)This is such a cute story, and so utterly suspended in the amber of such a specific moment in time! I find it delightful! Well done, your cousin!
Oh wow, I cannot imagine what it would have been like to have a mother on LJ and in those same kinds of spaces. That must have been such a strange experience. It's lovely that you were able to share some aspects of that part of your lives, but yeah complicated relationship would appear to sum it up. (My mum and sister #1 know I'm in fandom but don't have much interest in learning the ins and outs of what that means beyond 'writes stories about book characters, writes/comments on blog posts on a social blogging site with other people who share similar interests, sometimes meets up in person with the people she knows through these interests'; and I mean they've met people from the Pullman fansite like
Connection and family and historical revisionism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Still kind of the best and worst of those worlds.
That would seem to sum it up nicely.
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Date: 2025-12-13 05:21 pm (UTC)It WAS strange, but, given I wasn't aware of the fannish parts of her activities, it was mostly distasteful to me because she'd talk about me and my sibling, and we hated that. To be clear, obviously an adult with kids is allowed to talk to her friends about her kids and the experiences she has with parenting, but being able to, as said kids, see it online was uncomfortable and often hurtful. Had she had that social circle IRL, we wouldn't ever have been the wiser, and therein hangs the two-edged sword of the Internet! (Being able to just see the LOTRIPS, with the family stuff hidden, rather than the other way around, honestly would have probably been better!)
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Date: 2025-12-13 06:10 pm (UTC)You and your cousin converging, however, is delightful!
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Date: 2025-12-14 04:20 am (UTC)I was first online on dialup in the late 90s, mostly at the local library, and I founded the Red Dwarf Slash Society (RDSS) Yahoo Group as one of the first things I did, and I'm still friends with a bunch of people from it. I've moved on from Yahoo as my email provider, but I had both Yahoo and Hotmail so I could then dodge whatever was blocked by my high school (they were bad at using wildcards in address blockers, so I'd be typing lc2.law5.hotmail.com one week and then just changing the numbers when they blocked that). I was also on LJ. It was all about staying in touch with friends and in many ways it still is.
The other key thing about the internet for me was I wrote fan fiction before I was ever online and when I discovered other people did it online there was no turning back. I started in X-Files fandom (in some of those stories, Mulder and Krycek were gay and having sex with each other!), but only as a writer (not posting) and reader (voracious); the RDSS was my first online home where the community met the transformative works. I used to download scads of .txt files to an old 1.44mb floppy disc, aiming for quantity in my limited library internet time (usually I could book an hour) to take home and read on my home computer, which didn't have internet until... I think when broadband rolled out, and my brother started uni. I remember not having internet at home during my undergrad degree and booking computer lab time to do assignments.
I had a Geocities site. I'm trying to remember how all the coding worked so I can set up a Neocities site, not to replicate it, but because I can't handle WordPress and Carrd doesn't quite do what I want it to do.
So: mostly it's about community and communication. And it felt revelatory. It still does. I try to never take it for granted.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-14 03:20 pm (UTC)mostly it's about community and communication. And it felt revelatory. It still does. I try to never take it for granted.
That's a beatuiful way to put it.