It probably won't come as a surprise, considering you're reading this on a neocities website, but I am not the biggest fan of social media, or the current state of the internet today in general. It's hard to write a criticism of social media without coming across too "old man shouts at cloud"/"what if phones but too much", but I have some strong feelings on the topic so I'm gonna do it anyway.

My first experience of computers was a Windows 98 PC in the spare bedroom of my family home when I was a child. It wasn't even connected to dial up at that point. I'm not exactly sure why we had it, looking back...but I did spend many an hour on MS Paint and MS Word, creating Word Art and just generally having a great time. After that we moved on to a Windows XP, dial-up connected PC which is where my love of website-building began - I wasn't particularly great at it and neither were any of my friends, but that wasn't what mattered - what mattered was that we had a place to express ourselves and be as creative as we wanted. My first website was made on 'matmice', I've checked the internet archive but sadly it was never indexed. I also spent a lot of time customising my pet pages on neopets, and I had a piczo site at some stage too. These pages were full of rainbow divider GIFs, blinkies, stamps, MIDI files of Avril Lavigne songs, etc etc.

The main thing I remember from that era is that I could spend HOURS tending to my websites. All that would end up changing would be a few text colours, maybe a customised button and a new tiled background, some marquee text - but I would spend so much time getting things just how I wanted them. My parents definitely thought it was a bit strange that their kid would sit staring at code for hours on end rather than going outside - in the days of the Communal Desktop Computer there wasn't really any way to hide how much time you spent staring at a screen. They would tell me to take a break, do something else, etc. I don't want to fall into the trap of romanticising those days too much, and demonising social media as it is today. I think every generation thinks the way they spent their childhood is superior to how the current generation of children are spending theirs. If you went back far enough, you could probably find someone arguing that 'hoop and a stick' game would be the downfall of humanity, or that Yo-Yos poisoned the minds of a generation.

When I was a teenager, I definitely fell into the 'hating-anything-that's-popular-just-to-be-different' crowd, but those days are well and truly behind me. I wear crocs on a regular basis and I own a Stanley cup. But all that being said...I really, really don't like social media. At all. I grew up watching it morph and mutate in real-time. I remember when facebook became available for the first time and my friends were excited to sign up for an account. I thought it was weird that it demanded your real, full name, home town, school, etc. It felt more like filling in some kind of government paperwork than having fun online like I was used to. I got an account because everyone else was, but I never really enjoyed using it. It seemed like the worst aspects of being online - the virtual popularity contest - were at the forefront, and it never felt very authentic or unique. Of course there was an overlap during this time period with more customisable platforms which I used too - Myspace, tumblr, etc - but facebook and later, twitter, were massively taking over, and it was seen as really strange not to use them. So I did. For years, I kept up a constant presence on facebook, twitter and later, instagram. HTML became a distant memory.