First Encounters With "The Net"

      My first experiences with the Internet were two side by side instances. My sister and I had been trying to convince my mother to sign up for AOL. After many discussions, she finally gave in. We signed up just as the music downloading site Napster was popular. My sister and I took full advantage of Napster, as we would download songs everyday. The connection we had was slow. Each song would take at least an hour to download. We would replay the fragment of the song we were trying to download as my mother would cook dinner. Sometimes we would multitask and play RollerCoaster Tycoon together while the songs were downloaded. I look back at this usage of the Internet as a very positive experience for my sister and I. We weren't fighting over what was on TV, or the radio, or who sat in the front seat. We were bonding and spending quality time together as a family. I value this experience very much.
     My other experience was likely a very negative one. Our subscription with AOL also gave us access to the chat rooms. I spent a lot of time in these chat rooms with people I would never meet. Often times in these chat rooms, many people around my age would have inappropriate conversations about things our parents would not be pleased we were discussing. My friends would also sign on their computers and join into the same chat rooms. We quickly found an interest in joining in on these false realities that other users would create. Someone would say, "Hanging out by the pool" and then proceed to describe how old they were or what they are wearing. All the guys in the room would compete in this false reality to win the assumed females "hanging out by the pool". Eventually as we became more experienced with chat rooms, we decided to become pests in the chat rooms. Internet savvy people would know this as "trolling" today. We would go into a chat room to stir up trouble. We laughed and joked and stayed up extremely late, especially during summer vacations from school. At the time we would crack jokes about our online adventures in person with our other friends that didn't have "the net". We look back in the present day, and cannot believe what we used to say to complete strangers.
    These two experiences yielded very different results. The first experience brought my family closer together, as we would all be in the same room after school until dinnertime talking about all kinds of things. It was a very healthy family environment that I would not trade for anything. The second experience brought a foul mouth loaded with sexual inuendos and a great deal of inappropriate ideas into my head. Over time I grew out of these bad habits online chat rooms taught me. I had a good enough head on my shoulders to get through this negative experience that I wish never happened.