jacked in.

• Posted on 27th May 2006
• in maura dot com
• by maura

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3.30 am on the day before i turn 31 seems like as good a time as any to declare that i’ve been online for what amounts to pretty much half my life. the evolution of my online persona has been pretty steady, if suddenly jolted into online-me-as-real-me existence by the purchase of maura.com ten years ago this august; when i started, i was claiming to have two extra years tacked on my age, a residence in princeton and an acceptance letter to my local university, blonde hair, and a different vowel — an ‘i’ — at the end of my name.

in the pre-graphics days, it was a bit easier to fudge the self; compuserve’s all-number userids helped, as did the lack of pictures (ascii dicks aside, 2400-baud modems did have an upside or two). plus being online was pretty much a totally exotic, weird way to spend time, one that no one would gossip about the next day in chemistry class. sure, i’d bring a friend or two over every so often and show them the crazy, text-laden world that lived in my computer, chat invites from IN PAIN and all, but that would really be it. my online life, while it slowly took up bigger and bigger chunks of my time, seemed to be pretty much completely divorced from my day-to-day, and things for the most part stayed that way until i got my own computer in my wired-up dorm room in 1995. (my first boyfriend, who i met online, only met two or three of my friends while we were dating.)

so reading about the recent hubbubs over college students and post-grads putting incriminating evidence about their illegal activities (go cats!) and nda violations up on the web has had my mind rolling a bit. even when my decade-plus of web poesy-blather is figured in, i’m a pretty private person, and it’s probably unlikely that i’d ever put a full-body shot of myself online, much less one of me painted with shit about the meeting i had the other day. but i wonder — if online life had been more of a normal thing for me growing up, if i’d lived in a world populated with buddies and their icons, one in which being online wasn’t as isolating in an immediate sense (and i’d argue that the online-as-isolation-booth pattern carried into my initial post-graduate years, when i would find myself spending hours trawling the web and sending icq messages as an alternative to hitting the nassau county bar scene) would i be more open? less wary? or would that just be, you know, way too stupid?