When I was in high school I didn’t have a car or a job. I lived far from any friends, and there was nothing within walking distance. So I resorted to spending hours upon hours on the Internet.
My Internet obsession started with a few hours on AIM (AOL instant messenger). I then expanded my Internet time to about six or seven a day with IRC (internet relay chat) and Yahoo! Messenger.
I had searchable profiles on AIM and Yahoo. People I didn’t know would find me and most of the time I’d end up talking to them for a while. Sometimes this would result into becoming friends with a person I only talked to online. I really enjoyed the people I met online. I even liked them better than most of the people I met in Bakersfield. I really didn’t think this was weird or unacceptable.
However, people looked at me weird when I would mention someone I knew online or just even the fact I was online.
“What if you meet them and they kill and/or rape you?!” someone would say or make a joke about it. If my mom was watching a news story about a girl getting raped, murdered or something bad from meeting someone from online, my mom would say, “You should be watching this.”
I pretty much stopped telling anyone about my Internet life and only talked about it with people who knew me and understood why I did it.
Now I don’t really worry about it anymore because of the explosion of Myspace.com.
Teens and even adults are meeting people from MySpace like there is no tomorrow. No one looks at you weird if you say you met someone on MySpace. Meeting people online is so hip now it almost makes you weird for avoiding it.
You can’t walk 10 feet at Bakersfield College without hearing someone say “MySpace” in a sentence. MySpace attracts people from all different kinds of groups. The popular/rich kids, the hipster/emo kids and even the people who don’t know how to work a computer all have MySpace accounts.
Because of the popular MySpace site I no longer feel ashamed of meeting people online anymore. However, I still hesitate to tell someone I met someone online because I don’t actually have a MySpace account, and meeting someone from a not-so-popular site isn’t as accepted as compared to meeting someone on MySpace. For I still get those “you didn’t get murdered?” looks, whenever I mention my activity online.