You are only somebody these days if you have an on-line presence. Even my 78 year old father has mastered the art of email – something I thought would never happen. He uses it to keep in touch with people he met during the Great Leap Forward, the ones he toiled next to on the communal fields.
I’ve been on-line since 1994. I recently took a three week break from all internet activity and felt like a different person. I read more, called up people and spoke to them on the phone. I met up with people in real life.
My son is 18 months. He does not know what an old fashion non-portable phone looks like. He used to think remote controls were phones. Some friends of ours gave him a toy phone one Christmas. He freaked out. We used it as a sentry, stood it at the mouth of the forbidden zone.
I’m new to Facebook. I’ve never wanted a real on-line presence. Telling my real story in cyberspace does not come naturally to me but it’s what people do and those who do it well make a living from it. I spent a lot of time on MUDS/Moos in the mid 90s. Never as myself. Always as a vampire named Mina. I logged in with user name: #15482. I was just text interacting with other fictitious text people. I bit someone’s neck but I never had cyber sex.
I, like many other people, search for people they used to know on Facebook. I wanted to know what old long lost friends and other characters who sometimes surface in moments of nostalgia look like these days. I should not have looked them up.
The leading men of my youthful misadventures are no longer of teen-idol material. They do not look like George Clooney. Some memories are best kept in sepia tone in the archives of our minds. Lost weekends are not the same with a cast of aging character actors.
