The Internet Isn’t Everything
How my computer without internet access shaped how I view my digital privacy
Have you ever looked at your social media feed and asked yourself if some of this stuff is necessary? Like, do I really need to know that my cousin just ate at the local Chinese restaurant? The internet has become the go-to place to put all of our thoughts and actions, regardless of how relevant they may be. Most of Generation Z has grown up on social media, whether it be through “illegal” accounts made when we were younger than 13 or through our parents’ social media accounts as we were growing up. As a collective generation, we’ve been constantly putting our lives on the internet for all to see. But as we get older, we should start to have a little more control of what we put out there.
How we spend our time on social media now can be linked to the ways we spent our time as teens on the internet and social media. As I said earlier, many of us grew up with near-constant access to the internet, and with that came the applications and websites that tried to shape us into who we are today.
While this might be a general trend for Generation Z, it hasn’t always been that way for me. In fact, one of the best pieces of digital technology I had growing up was an old boxy computer that wasn’t even hooked up to the internet. This was pure privacy in its finest and that’s what I needed growing up. I think this computer is one of the main reasons that I’m still a private person online to this day.
I consider myself to be a private person, whether in person or online. I may have Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook, but I never consistently post original content on them. I mostly have them for their private functions like the direct messaging and chats or to show appreciation for other people’s content through likes. Of course, this is usually reserved for personal posts from my extended family, pictures of animals, or the one biology-based meme account I follow on Facebook. But the main point is that I don’t post my own original content on these sites.
The one social media site that I’m actively on is Tumblr and even that decision boils down to privacy because you don’t have to use your real-life name or any other identifiers to make an account on this site. You’re typically identified by your username and icon, so you have the ability to remain completely anonymous. This privacy makes it easier for me to express myself in ways that I might not get to offline, due to the nature of where I grew up. More conservative rural communities usually don’t take kindly to some of the more left-leaning ideas and identities that I’ve become accustomed to over time.
So, I’ve become a recluse of sorts on most of my social media accounts, only coming around every so often to look at what these sites have brought me and then leaving again until the next week. Obviously, this behavior didn’t just come up from thin air, so where did my love for my digital privacy come from?
I got my first real taste of digital privacy through an old box computer that my family got from my aunt after she passed away. While this was a “family” computer, it did get to live in my room, which was the coolest thing ever to eleven-year-old me, even if we couldn’t ever connect it to the internet. (Just to give a rough estimate of how old this computer was it ran Windows XP well into 2017.) It was a new step in the privacy that I really wanted as I was growing away from the main interests that the family had. Once I started listening to mainstream pop music instead of country music in 8th grade that was kind of it for the rest of the family interests and general ideas.
So the computer didn’t have access to the internet, but I could still do so much more with it that I couldn’t do at the family computer downstairs. I had my own password-protected account on my computer that meant that I could log out of it at any time and none of the rest of my family could get into the account and look at what I was doing. Granted my parents could make me open it at any time, but the faked privacy felt just as good as the real thing. I could do whatever I wanted with the applications already downloaded on the computer and it was one of the best things that could have happened to me creatively.
Microsoft Word became a lifeline to me. I could type up all my schoolwork while listening to all the music that I ripped from my CDs while also having a more secure place to put all of my creative writing. Before this computer, I would handwrite fanfiction down in a notebook that I carried around with me everywhere. Any person could have gone into my book stack at school and found it. The fact that I had the gall to do that in high school honestly astounds me now. Like, I get nervous when someone walks up behind me and I don’t have my laptop open to something school-related.
Anyway, I used to write down all of these chapters and ideas, but the only problem was that they would sit around in the notebooks or in the three 4-inch binders I had to try and organize all of these writings in. My room was honestly a fire waiting to happen that’s how much paper was sitting in my room from all of my creative endeavors.
But my computer changed all of that. By typing up all my fanfiction into Word, I had a whole new place to put it where it would be harder to access. Since no one could access my documents, I was able to explore different parts of my writings that I wouldn’t have necessarily explored if I was writing this down. My computer allowed me to be more creative and to learn about myself as a writer and as a person.
Of course, most of the beginning content I made stayed on the computer, while some of the content that I edited over and over again was transferred to the family computer downstairs to be uploaded to fanfiction.net, but that was only after I had decided that it was good enough quality to do that. The main message here is that I needed a place to privately express myself through writing and my internetless computer made that possible.
Most of my experiences on the internet have been curated so that a more professional aspect of myself has been the most outward-facing facet. I created different environments where I could be my professional self or I could be more like myself. The personal computer was definitely the main home of the latter, which is what I needed the most at that time.
Being a teenager sucks in general, but it only gets worse when you’re growing up in front of a crowd. Having a sort of digital privacy meant that I was controlling most of what I let others see of me, persona or not. My digital privacy came directly from my private computer, in that it allowed me a space to be myself and feel comfortable, so I didn’t feel the need to do any of that online.
How I interacted with digital technology when I was younger really shaped how I interact with the internet and social media today. I don’t aspire to upload my entire life for all the internet to see like some sort of Kardashian, like that’s not me and I think all of that came from the privacy my computer gave me. While this is probably not the most popular view or use of social media, I hope that it brings a new perspective to how social media can bend the way we think about our privacy, especially now as almost every facet of our lives is moved online.
