What its like to revisit your middle school blogs
If you don’t know about this cool website, then you definitely should check it out. The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive is a comedy gold mine. You can look at any website that has been captured on the Internet Archive, including ones you’ve created. It’s an exercise in hilariousness and a reminder that the Internet was not a very aesthetic place in the very beginning.
Obviously, the Wayback Machine can’t completely teleport you back in time. Instead it shows you snapshots of what the Internet looked like back then. As you can see in the snapshot above, my first Tumblr blog doesn’t work because all the links are broken. I closed that Tumblr blog down over four years ago, so there’s no way to see all the cringe-worthy content on the page. At least you can see how the page was laid out (and that God-awful banner). What was high-school me thinking?
While I haven’t really used or been on Tumblr since high school, my Tumblr blog is still around, though the theme was accidently changed about two years ago when I started a blog dedicated to my time in China. This was its original theme:
I had another blog on Blogger.com way back in middle school, so circa 2011, but it seems to have been lost to the nether regions of the internet. Which is fine by me. People do NOT need to see the musings of 13-year-old me. I don’t even want to know what 13-year-old me thought was cool or good writing back then.
It’s interesting, though, that I’m a part of the first generation that has lived almost their entire lives on the Internet. We’ve made celebrities of people who basically just blog about their lives on YouTube. They’re called “influencers” and people give them money, send them presents and treat them like celebrities. If textbooks in one hundred years from now don’t claim the Internet as a major catalyst for change in the late 90s — early 2000s, then they’re liars.
With our lives increasingly on the internet, what part of ourselves do we get to keep to ourselves? Is there any part of us that we can keep hidden from the rest of the world? I often joke, “If you didn’t take a picture, did it really happen?” but the truth of the matter is this: I don’t want people to be taking photos of every single thing in their lives. Sure, when I’m bored its fun to scroll endlessly through my Facebook feed, but does it make me any happier to know that people are “living their best lives”?
Sometimes, it’s just nice to let yourself live in the moment. Being present when you’re at dinner with friends or family, keeping your phone turned off during a movie or a date or a party — these were all things we once took for granted. Now, we can barely seem to focus for more than five minutes before we have to turn to our magical, all-knowing devices. I know, I know — we can’t go back to the days before the internet or smartphones, but we can work towards being more mindful. We can work towards being in the moment when we’re surrounded by the people whom we love. And we can work towards living IRL (in real life) instead of on the world wide web.
