Seeing the blue light of the bird

The other day my Journalism 108 teacher suggested that everyone in the class get Twitter.

Obviously, this isn’t the first I’ve heard about Twitter. My AP Government teacher had a constant obsession with it and we spent many a class day listening about the Tweets he read from various people. But I couldn’t see myself getting one. As far as I knew, none of my peers had a Twitter they regularly updated. If you wanted to update everyone about your fascinating existence, you changed your Facebook status.

But as I sit in the newsroom diligently working (hello my bosses and editors!) I can’t help but notice that Twitter is big here. Everyone has one that they check and update often. Something I originally had classified as the adult answer to social networking (without looking like a perv or an uncool parental) now is common among my peers.

What does this mean?

I means I have reached a new age level in the Internet.

The explanation:
As I grow older, my network of choice seems to continuously change every several years, each site a record of my progress on the journey to adulthood. A network change is classified by two things.
1. Deciding the old network is stupid and immature.
2. Getting annoyed with anyone younger than me using the new network as the site is “not for them.”

It began when I was 7 and my dad brought a computer into my room and connected our household to the World Wide Web, and in the beginning it was all about Neopets. I had some kind of virtual kitty with alien ears and a virtual big furry blob that I fed virtual food and played virtual games. All my friends and I would neo-chat and I even picked up some basic HTML. We were basically 2 c00L 4 wRdz!!!11!!

Eventually, my interest waned. My heart no longer went out to the piles of pixels who claimed they were “starving” and my freshman year in high school I got a MySpace. I took my first narcissistic profile pic (I never went for the camera in the mirror look, for me it was all about holding the camera above my head and looking into it, convinced the super-high angle made me appear skinnier) and the obsession began.

I enjoyed changing the layout of my page, updating my interests to make me sound cooler, and dissing people by removing them from my top eight.

But eventually, the comments on my wall were coming from porn sites, people selling weed and natural male enhancers. Fashing neon advertisements were everywhere. And once a month some new idiot girl would get herself raped by meeting up with a pretneding-to-be-15-hottie and parentals worldwide would freak.

And yet, I wasn’t ready to abandon MySpace for the up and coming Facebook. I felt that Facebook was a wanna-be site, and the hype surrounding it quickly would die. Also, I only can remember so many usernames and passwords. But eventually, my friends began to make the switch, and, with a longing look at my classy blue-and-white stripped profile page, I had searched three hours to find, I made the move.

Since then I have been an active Facebook stalker. I have spent long hours creeping on albums silently judging the people in the photos. I amassed and impressive number of bumper stickers (the majority dealing with Edward Cullen and the worlds “EPIC FAIL,”) and completely abandoned AIM for Facebook chat. I am currently in three groups all trying for the Guiness World Record for largest group, four groups demanding the old layout of facebook back, and seven for friends who have lost their phones and need numbers. I roll my eyes at the middle-school aged children who get profiles, and consider friending any person 10 years older than me with great caution.

But now those middle school students are entering high school. And I am slowly beginning to see the blue light of the bird. No needed to dig through conversations between my ex-boyfriend and some kid I met one time three years ago to find what I really want. And I don’t need to wait for Gabe Saporta to friend me before I can begin getting updates on the most mundane details of his life, which I will find both exciting and newsworthy.

I have to wonder at my virtual future. Each new era of my life has been accompanied by a new Web site obsession. How long will this pattern continue for? Is Twitter the end of the road, or just another networking site in a long line of online communities? Will my generation ever find a resting place in the web? Will I still be taking pictures with my camera phone when I am 45?

These overly dramatic questions only will be answered with time. And yet, one constant remains:

My self confidence is completely and totally based on the number of friends/followers I have. E_wilk people!