daydreamer's footnotes

I am always reserved on sharing anything in a blog or anywhere on the internet. Not that I expect anyone reading it, but because once it is out in the opening, you are vulnerable. You are also responsible for what you are saying, regardless if you are expecting an audience or not. The fact you have published to the internet, you are ultimately responsible for the space you allowed public access.

I do not get to access the internet until maybe late high school, back in the days when we were still using dial-up to connect to the internet. Most of the time back then, I only use the computer to type my essays and homework when the school required it. I didn’t have ‘online’ time in a household that shared a single giant white box computer between the whole family.

When ICQ was a new cool thing amongst my schoolmates, I paid no attention to it. One of my friends who tried to rope me into the trend even opened an account for me. I never used it nor ever logged onto the ICQ platform. Chatting online was just weird to me with my very traditional way of communication. To be fair, I didn’t really care about online chatting. I preferred one-to-one personal interactions, I still do to this very day. When MSN messenger took over, and I somehow ‘had to’ use it to talk online with ‘friends’, as they called it on MSN. I have a sense that some of my chatmates there took it as a replacement of things they cannot verbally communicate to the intended person, so typing it makes it less of a burden… . I didn’t end up being friends with anyone of them in real life, and if they are still considered friends, then they are some really distance friends from a brief moment of time in my life.

Before I learned any online etiquette in the late 90s early 2000s, I defriended almost every one of my classmates after we were no longer in the same classes, because, well, I didn’t feel there was a need to keep them on the list. To be honest, I didn’t think we will be crossing path again after school was over, and to this day, we didn’t. I was brutally honest with my feeling and type exactly how I feel and what I have to say, even if that meant I would hurt the recipient’s feeling. Now thinking in reflection, I guess it was not necessary to defriend people, I could have just closed the account for good without doing anything. Ah well, what did I know about the internet back then?

For someone who seems to be misunderstood every time I open my mouth, I became very quiet for a period after the MSN trauma. For months I didn’t talk, even now I feel like I have lost something in my speech. I probably have developed a mild form of PTSD from those experiences. That was a period between my high-school and university years, and it was just about 20 years ago.