How The Internet Graduated High School by Jenny, who is from the Internet.

My name is Jenny, and I am from the Internet.  I love living on the Internet. In many ways the Internet is intangible.  It lives the tubes and we can only access it through a device.  However my favorite thing about the Internet is that it is somehow alive, and it seems to me that the Internet went through development stages similar to human life-span development.

I first moved to Internetland in 1995 on a dial-up connection. This was back when the Internet was a baby. It took 30 minutes to load most websites, and after my friend Nilah introduced me to a bot in a chat room that wanted to rape me with octopus tentacles, "That just means he likes you!" I became afraid of the Internet for a while. Quickly, those who used the internet learned not to talk to strangers, much like preschoolers.

In 1998, the Internet became faster.  Webpages took five minutes or less to load. Suddenly we were allowed to make webpages ourselves using Angelfire, have online diaries, and use social media such as Bolt. Social media wasn't called social media back then and Bolt was considered a zine for teens.  It had news stories as well as forums.  I went to the library each day after school to interact with others on Bolt because the library internet was still faster.  Talking to strangers was fine, but do not give out too much personal information.  Internet was now in grade school.

In 1999 I discovered chat rooms with webcams and virtual world chat rooms and more websites with forums and boards for various interests. By 2000 LiveJournal was popular, and by 2002 drama became a big deal. Internet was beginning to escape its awkward pre-teen stages and was making leaps and bounds in junior high.

After that, because of real life events, I took a break from the internet.  I got on to pay bills, check email, and catch up with friends, but I did not venture onto new websites, and I did not notice the development of social media right away.  I was too busy trying to figure out if I could get a job even though I dropped out of college so I wouldn't have to sleep on a cold basement floor.  I neglected the Internet, and the Internet developed without a lot of supervision and when I returned it seemed to have a demeanor of a juvenile delinquent in a boarding school.

I returned in 2006.  The internet had very much changed from 2002 to 2006. The cool thing was who could be the biggest Internet bad ass.  You'd think that being an Internet bad ass would have to do with who could make the funniest video on YouTube with the most hits or to have the most profitable eBay account, but it wasn't. The best way to be a true Internet bad ass was to try to ruin other people's lives as much as possible.

I'd had run-ins with trolls before; had a good laugh at goatse and lemonparty and disgusting graphics, but trolls seemed to be the exception instead of the rule. The way to be popular was to create funny content with positive observations that others related to, or to run a successful business.  Trolls were frowned upon and all of us wrote them off as the fools they were.

Remember how in high school it mattered so much what people said about you because it felt like high school would last forever and that you would be friends with your friends forever and date your sweetheart forever?  The cliques would always interact in the same exact way and if you weren't in the right one your life was ruined.  Remember that?

And then you realized that the popular people who were well-adjusted and nice went on to have interesting jobs and awesome vacations and hopefully made a lot of money.  And the mean popular people who threw the nerdy kids in the dumpster and had screaming fights with random people in the hallway usually ended up being a parent or a drop out by senior year or something they didn't want.

(Hey, my cousin was a nice girl who was a parent by graduation, and I dropped out of school for three months my junior year, and we turned out OK.  I mean we didn't die or end up in prison for life or anything. However these are probably not things most people aspire to.)

You realized that being cool didn't matter, because the only people you needed to impress were people who already loved you, and maybe the Dean of Admissions or your future boss.

The Internet became that insecure part of high school for a few years, except everyone was an adult, and everyone thought they were Regina George from Mean Girls. As an offline adult you wouldn't go up to someone you didn't know on the street and tell them they were made of fail, but being a smart ass on the Internet was just part of everyday interaction.  In real life if you didn't like someone, you would probably talk behind their back at worst.  However, dissecting someone down to each component in a comment to that person, snarking their looks to their hometown to the dumb things they said, was highly encouraged.

It was all fun and games before some idiots went too far.  Some trolls called up employers and got people fired, or bullied troubled teens into suicide.  Everyone laughed at the idea of Internet court until trolls faced jail time or hefty fines for their antics. Cyber-bullying became a buzzword, something to protect your family from, something reported on the news.

I feel like the Internet graduated from its high school stage after that.  During elementary school it created its building blocks and decided its purpose during its junior high stage.  However, after websites made it easier to report cyber-bullying, people flocked to more positive environments.  The Internet became about sharing information again, and the Internet wanted to change the world. The Internet wanted to get its liberal arts degree, become involved in social justice, improve the quality of our food and lose weight.

The internet wanted to make the best content and strove to associate itself with the most powerful, influential content providers.

Sure, the snarking websites are still out there, but their purpose has changed. Sure, people still want to ruin other people's lives, but those people eventually grow out of it.  They become a normal person, blogging about crying her eyes out in front of everyone after her ass was kicked in kick boxing class when they finally step out from behind the screen.  That person who yelled at you and started a flame war? She's likable and interesting and you don't hate her anymore. These people become just like everyone else, because after high school most people are just like everyone else, just trying to get by.