Welcome to the New Statesman's internet histories week, a re-examination of the parts of our lives spent online.
It’s easy to talk about the internet as though it’s an imaginary space, where the things we do don’t really matter. The dichotomies are everywhere: IRL vs internet; meatspace vs cyberspace; offline vs online.
Life online is a distraction, we’re told, and a destructive one at that. Dating apps are “ruining” dating, while phones are destroying our attention spans. “Look up,” as that patronising video told us, because the “real” world is happening outside our screens.
But for this week at least, we at the NS want to talk about the internet as a place where we’ve lived real, and sometimes considerable, portions of our lives. Whether the experiences were negative or postiive, the technology was just a tool that allowed us to seek them out.
It might be where we learned to masturbate, found people with the same bizarre interests as us, or first published a piece of writing. We’ll take a closer look at internet addiction, find out how we all use the internet to speak to those we love, and revisit our cringe-worthy (but formational) teenage exploits on social media.
Below you’ll find the links of all the stories we’ve run so far. Join in the conversation – and tell us your favourite Bebo or Livejournal memory – at #internethistories on Twitter, or in our comments sections on Facebook.
A half decade of total secrecy: how I became a successful Harry Potter webmaster
Nick Hilton looks back on his teenage years spent hatching wizarding fansites.