Given my age and my career path, I believe it would be fair to believe I’ve been online longer than most, and the ways I communicate online have shifted over the years, to be sure. My first real encounter with the Internet came around 1986, when the University of Kansas was connected to the Internet via a regional research and education network called Midnet. (The Internet in the U.S. was really only available to academia, the government, and the military prior to the early 90s.) But even before we had an Internet connection, we had a sort of crude email-like system on one of our campus mainframes that was used by many of the Academic User Services staff members at KU Computing Services, where I worked as a technical writer and consultant at the time. Eventually, as our connectivity was improved, and as our knowledge and understanding of the various Internet protocols and applications expanded, email became an extremely important way to communicate, and I still use email fairly extensively today, unlike some of my younger friends, acquaintances and family members, who seem to prefer text messaging, which, of course, is ubiquitous, given that there are upwards of 15 billion mobile phones in use around the world, and it is estimated that nearly 70% of the world’s population are cell phone subscribers. (Some suspect that the number of people worldwide with access to cell phones is much higher.) I text, multiple times each day, albeit with a relative small group of family and friends.
Back in the day, there was a platform called Usenet, sort of like a collection of discussion fora, where I frequently went for asynchronous interaction with others and for answers to questions, mostly in technical areas, some related to my work in computing, some related to hobby interests, such as amateur radio. I frankly don’t know if Usenet groups even exist any more–they may have been supplanted by various other forum platforms, such as groups.io and countless others, like Reddit (I’m not sure I even understand properly what Reddit is).
I was once a fairly regular Twitter reader (and very infrequent poster), though my interest in the platform has diminished considerably since Elon Musk turned it into “X” (and ruined it in other ways IMHO). I used to be a more frequent Facebook user, beginning in late 2006 or early 2007, not long after access was granted to those outside of colleges and universities. At some point–I can’t really remember when, but probably before 2015–I stopped paying much attention to Facebook. By then the user interface and the ways people were using the platform had changed so much that I felt I’d been left behind and I really had no idea what I was doing there. I also became increasingly aware of how polarized and toxic some of the Facebook world had become, and I’m pretty sure I shut my account down at least once and possibly another time, but I eventually restored it because I have a small number of Facebook friends who rarely contact me by any other means. I’ve made a few stabs at getting back up to speed in Facebook world, but they’ve been half-hearted attempts.
Instagram is the platform I probably use the most, outside of email and text messaging, but I still post relatively rarely. But it does still afford me the opportunity to catch up with friends and acquaintances.
When my wife and I walked the Camino Inglés in northwest Spain in 2018, we became friends with a couple of women (sisters) from Sochi, Russia, whom we encountered on the trail. We walked about the same pace, so we saw them often, frequently stopped at the same café/bars, restaurants and hostels, and managed to communicate fairly well via Google Translate They were also What’s App users, and we downloaded What’s App in order to communicate with them (we used the app to coordinate a dinner that we shared with them after arriving at our pilgrimage destination, Santiago de Compostela), and though I seldom use the app, my wife, who teaches English as a second language at the university, has begun using it to stay in touch with former students around the world.
Aside from this blog, which is largely one-way communication (though I do appreciate the kind (but rare) comments of the few who read it), that’s about it.
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(Posted in response to 1/14/2024 prompt)
doug heacock: words 