The Internet, A Love Story

I remember my first taste of the internet. My mom brought home a giant, cow patterned box and set up a now comically large computer set up in the corner of our living room. I was 11, maybe 12 and I was delighted and curious. I loaded the AOL disc into the modem tower, made sure no one in my house was using our landline phone, clicked on my profile picture and after 60 seconds of mind numbing static and noise, I was in! And would you believe it? I had mail.

It was spam, of course. Something not important enough to remember the contents of or even the sender, but it was mail. A digital piece of a note, sent directly to my inbox. How cool!

I started exploring the likes of AOL chat rooms, Neopets, AskJeeves, gurl, marykateandashley.com just to name a few. I was learning the lingo like a/s/l and lol and nm wbu. It felt like something so special I couldn’t really fathom it entirely. A secret language, a way of connection, a source of entertainment and an outlet of self expression combined, and just sitting in my living room.

When I was around 15, MySpace showed up and it was - not to be dramatic - life changing. Not only did Myspace make it possible to connect with my school friends after dismissal and without having to call their house and awkwardly ask their parents if they were home only to find out they weren’t and then when they finally called me back, I wasn’t home. It also gave me the space and motivation to learn to code so I could design my site to my exact specifications. My top 8? Gone. The ugly orange and blue colored fonts? Changed. The music player? Hidden but still very much there and blasting the most obnoxious screamo music that I was into at the time. I could express myself in new ways like changing my profile picture, my name, my profile song. I could post blogs and bulletins and let people know what I was up to. And my friends could see it, engage with it, leave me a comment if they just popped by my page and wanted to say hi. In a time where my family had just imploded and I felt like I had no one, I had Myspace and I was in love. Imagine my surprise when years later, I would meet my now husband on Myspace.

Then, I started college in the fall of 2006 and my roommate told me about FB. I hadn’t heard of FB - can you imagine - but she said it was basically like Myspace for college students. You had to have a student email to create an account and omg… *I* had a student email and that meant that *I* could create an account. So I did and when I first got there, I found it droll if I’m being honest. I couldn’t change the layout at all, there was no music player and status updates were set to post in third person. “Natalie Meagan was not impressed.” However, I made my first college friends on FB. A girl invited me to a comedy show at a bar a few towns over and we had a great time watching Patton Oswalt and Brian Posehn with big, black X’s on our hands. I messaged people about sharing notes from a class we had together, I let people know when I was working at the coffee shop so they could stop by, I asked if anyone wanted to carpool to the Dance Gavin Dance show. I made friends with FB, I forged relationships because of FB, I kept in touch with friends back home on FB and for a while, it was fine.

In the interim, a lot of other sites of lesser importance to me popped up as well. Tumblr, Xanga, Livejournal, Twitter, etc. I tried them all with varying interests levels but for the most part, FB and Myspace were my main spots. However, over time things started to shift and change as all things do eventually. Myspace was sold and not as fun anymore. FB had lost the appeal once they started letting just anyone join. I, myself, was different. I was getting married, I was becoming a mother. Out of boredom and a need for connection, I began dabbling in blogging while occasionally still posting on my socials but it felt like the spark had died out.

Then Instagram appeared almost as if the internet gods themselves heard my pleas. Instagram offered a way of short form, visual story telling that combined photography and writing in a neat, grid style layout that really spoke to me. I dove in. I added all my friends from various other social media platforms, I started sharing about my life, my kids, my hobbies, my food (dear god, my food) and overnight, the internet was fun again! Even on some of my hardest days, something good could be found in the app on my phone.

Cut to 2015, when I started a creative business by accident. I was a young mom with no job and a very small circle of friends. I felt lost, stuck and directionless. In a moment of panic, I started sharing my art featuring words of encouragement, candid, tender moments and relatable quotes in my cute hand written scripts and just like that, I was a brand?! The Crybaby Club was a mini art business that I successfully ran out of my house for 7 years. I had 30,000+ followers on IG, participated in several markets and events, was featured in publications (online and in print), I even got interviewed by Shopify for their Behind the Brand series. I had built a business that fed my family and a community that fed my soul. Yes I am waxing poetic about an internet based brand, leave me alone.

Then… the pandemic happened. The hustle mindset and the go, go, go energy I had with Crybaby dwindled as my worldview shifted. During that time, online community was so important because many of us were sheltering in place, unable to connect in the real world like we always had before but I could not find it in myself to bring the same energy. Something in me had changed and I didn’t know what to do.

I started hearing whispers of TikTok and decided to give it a shot. It seemed fun and I needed some of that during the days of quarantine and trying to get my kids to sit still and listen to a zoom class while my husband tried to work from our living room. Imagine my surprise when I had already downloaded the app before back when it was still Music.ally. I had had fun doing dumb little dances back then so, even more excited than I had been, I redownloaded the new TikTok app and started shitposting to feel something.

It worked and I had a lot of fun making content to make people smile but it wasn’t until 2022 that I shifted my content towards books that my life - real and online - would shift once again. I started reviewing books, talking about books I loved and eventually, books I hated and Weirdo Book Club because yet another job I started by accident with the help of the internet. I got on live ONCE and just started rambling about this terrible book that I read and in just a couple of hours, 2000 followers showed up. Then 4,000. Then 10,000. From there, I started an online book club so we could all read stuff together and I shifted my content to long form YouTube videos too. I now get paid to review books on YT and I have a very active community on Discord, Bindery, Patreon, etc. However, all of this started with TikTok, because of TikTok.

Today, I am a full time content creator which allows me the means to pay bills and take care of my family while also granting me the freedom of working from anywhere on my own schedule so I can also take care of my kids and family in ways other than financial. I literally have my dream job.

If only I could go back in time and tell the high schooler, learning HTML to make her Myspace look cool, that one day she would use those skills to build a professional website for herself. If I could tell her that making parasocial connections with people in AOl chat rooms and FB message boards would one day lead to a community of almost 100,000 people (combined from all my socials, obviously.) If I could tell the young, stay at home mom who felt like she would never be anything more that, that her videos are watched by the thousands and aid people in getting their chores done or unwinding from a tough day at work. If I could tell the girl, newlywed and brand new mom, that she found her own way of making money for her family… I would tell her that all of it happened because of the internet and more recently, because of TikTok.

None of this is said to brag, merely to paint a picture of how throughout my life, the internet has been my friend. However, the internet is not my friend, you are. Parasocially of course, but friends nonetheless. I have also met some of my IRL best friends through social media and keeping up with them through their TikTok’s, etc. is truly a gift when so many of them are so far away from me. Connection, community, livelihoods, access to each other, access to information, the ability to organize, etc. That is what this ban is taking away from people, from my friends, from me. All because billionaires want absolute control of money and information while using Red Scare tactics to pretend like it’s something else.

Yes, there will be other apps. Yes, I will try them until something sticks for me. Yes, if it changes, I will follow suit. Yes, (I hope) my community will continue to find me through all of these things. I have done it before, I will do it again. It is just a strange new set of circumstances leading me to have to this time around. Throughout my life, the internet has offered me ways of connection, kinship, education, entertainment, expression, fun and monetary gain when I needed them. I met my husband on Myspace, made friends on FB, started a business on IG and another on TikTok. When I needed to be home with my kids, I was able to still work because of the internet. When the pandemic came and we were quarantined, I was still able to work because of the internet. My very real life has been enriched by the connections I made on the internet.

Change is inevitable, I get it, kumbaya. However, the people who are diminishing this as not a big deal, just a silly kids app, etc. should ask themselves “if it’s just a silly little kids app and not that big of a deal, why is the literal government working so hard to shut it down?”

I am under no false pretense that the internet is all good, all the time. Nothing is. There are constant issues, mishaps, mishandlings, bullying, blocking, lurking, misinformation, breaches of trust and now, the dreaded AI looms in the shadows, threatening even further ruin. This is simply my love letter to a space that has given more than it’s taken. And just like a former lover, there have been good times and bad times… but I want to remember the good times as we continue to move forward through this weird as hell thing known as life, online.