The Early Days

I first started using the Internet back in the early 2000s. At that point it was still very much a niche pursuit and in the very early days I just used it to buy online invariably from Amazon. When I moved to Hong Kong I used it to keep in touch with people in the UK and the US mainly via Facebook. After a while I started using it to take a DELTA course which really helped my EAP teaching, but because it was online was never accepted by any organisation, even though the content was excellent. Once I discovered Friends Reunited I added it to my communication repertoire. That and Facebook enabled me to keep in touch and get back in touch with people. Along with that I enjoyed using chat boards to talk about books and films.

Looking back to 20 years ago, communication online was there for the purpose of sharing ideas with people you often didn’t know and for reminiscing on a shared past with people you did. The anger, controversy and rage bait approach that we have nowadays was practically unheard of. Of course it existed but it was very occasional in nature whereas now you end up seeing it everywhere. I think I first noticed it when I put a couple of books on Kindle and some of the comments were very unpleasant. I would not write negative reviews for other people and I couldn’t understand the obvious delight that others took in trashing other people’s efforts. If you don’t like it, just move on, especially when it is fiction writing as something that you don’t like will be something someone else does and every writer puts heart, soul and effort into every book. It stopped me from writing fiction and moved me on to writing reviews and reflections which actually suit me much better.

Sadly, human nature being what it is, anger, spite and abuse was always going to rear its ugly head. The people in charge of huge tech companies became more and more unpleasant, attaching themselves to ever more authoritarian politicians who hated those who disagreed with them. It’s now reflective of the worst of human nature and I do miss the old days of the Internet where nice people were the majority of users. I do still value little areas of the Internet like this but they are few and far between. As the sweatshirt I am wearing today says ‘People Ruin Everything’! The Internet was always going to be ruined and the only surprise was that it stayed nice for so long.