Bluewave Digital

From news to entertainment, money making and money spending, more and more people are spending their lives online. What is it about this medium that attracts people to it like moths to a flame?

I suppose it really depends on where you live and how old you are. Personally, I'm in this weird inter-generational gap where I'm not quite Gen-X, but I'm not quite a Millennial (or Gen-Y, or whatever they call themselves these days) either. Basically this puts me at growing up in an age where access to the Internet was just becoming available to every day "normal" folk. Those that had been online for the 20 years prior to this call this era the "Eternal September", when the unwashed masses started posting content online, ranging from questions on Usenet to home pages on Geocities. Those days, everyone connected with a dial-up modem with that sound that for those of us that grew up with it, will never leave our collective sub-conscious.

I remember when I first started going online, I marveled at the idea that I could read stuff posted by people all over the world. That sense of wonder still sticks with me today, though I have to admit that after all these years I am a bit jaded by the experience. What got me into web design was a crazy idea I had when I was about 12 or 13 about creating a website where teens could interact with each other, posting content on forums and generally having discussions with others in their age group about whatever they fancied. In essence, I suppose, I was creating a social networking site far earlier than MySpace was a glimmer in Tom's eye...

Of course, my 13 year old self lacked the technical knowledge to create such a thing, and when I finally did complete the site and put it up, no one came. It was a rather grounding experience. Before then, I had worked under the principle of "if you build it, they will come". I had really believed that as soon as I had put a website up, people would just flock to it. Alas, this was not the case.

After that, aside from helping my dad get his original website up, I mainly stayed dormant in the web realm, sticking to places like Slashdot for most of my Internet "formative" years. Thinking back on it, I guess that explains a lot...

The big change came when I moved to San Francisco and had an always on, high speed University broadband connection in my room. It was here that I started my web design business and learned to basically live online. E-mail was my lifeline to the outside world, and it got to the point where chatting online via AIM turned me into a multi-tasking monster, with minimum 4 chat windows open at once.

What does my personal Internet history have to do with anything? I'm getting to that.

While in the dorms, anything that I needed to get that I couldn't get at odd hours (I was awake a lot at 3am. Go figure), I would just order online. If I needed a book, my first thought would invariably be Amazon. I needed some random electronic trinket? eBay. News? CNN.com, bbc.co.uk and others. Even some of my class material was online.

As time went on, this trend kept going to the point where I was even ordering groceries online due to the lack of having a car and the grocery store being 45 minutes away in either direction on foot. I wasn't the only one. Slowly, others in my generation slowly started putting more and more of their lives online, ranging from things like livejournal (which I'm actually surprised is still around) to mySpace and later Facebook for college students.

Nowadays it's not uncommon for someone to basically live online. Between MMORPGS and social networking sites, social interaction has completely morphed into a hybrid of real and online "friends". What I'm curious to see if how this will affect culture and society as these people (my sister's generation, I'm looking at you) who have never known not having the Internet at their finger tips.

Interesting times we live in.

As an aside, at the time of this writing, hurricane Gustav's arms have landed in Louisiana, and I'm tracking it online as it happens. these guys are tracking it and have a live web cam on the ground streaming live. Hopefully the mayor of New Orleans was over-exaggerating when he called it the "Storm of the Century".