For a while now I've been trying to think of how we stalked before Facebook. Could we really have just gotten our information from gossip and word of mouth? We learned how to play the game "telephone" early on, starting with a boring sentence and ending with a juicy secret. It was our first taste of a lifetime of gossiping. As we grew up we began to use a real telephone to tell our little stories and then came something that changed the way we live today. AOL.
My love affair with the internet started in the 4th grade (the early 90s). My friend called and said, "Want to come over and play on the internet? Just don't tell your mom what we are doing." I was immediately intrigued. We snuck into her dad's office in her basement and spent hours perusing AOL for everything and nothing at all. We created a profile, we joined chat rooms, and we eventually got ourself kicked off of AOL because we were using dirty language (can't say that was the first time I got in trouble for that).
AOL exploded and spawned a generation of stalkers. What? Don't pretend you didn't use AOL to continuously check the profile of the boy or girl you liked. Like I said, we started using it in 4th grade, by 6th grade we were full blown stalkers. Which leads me to middle school. If you were a boy in middle school you used AOL to torture the girls your age. If you were a girl in middle school you used AOL to write code names and words for the boy you liked in your profile and you would pray that he would and would not figure it out.
But where did AOL ago? After years of AOL being the main stalker network, new sites and social scenes hit the web and overnight it was as if AOL disappeared...
Stay tuned for Part II...
