If I Could Turn Back Time

I read with great dismay that one of my favourite bloggers, Maitri is stepping away from most of her online life.  She has said she will continue writing one blog but she has let the other blogs, Facebook and Twitter go in favour of living more in the real life.  I'm saddened by this because Maitri's blogs are one of the first I visited on a regular basis back when I started blogging a little over 4 years ago.  The thing is I really do understand where Maitri is coming from.  I know it has been a rough year for her especially with the loss of one of her beloved pugs. 

There are days that I honestly think walking away from my online life would just make things so much simpler.  There would be no pressure to try an get posts out on schedule and no dealing with any online nonsense.  In many ways I have cut back on my online activities especially when it comes to forums and groups but I'm considerably more active on social networks.  At the same time blogging fills a need for me so I have no intentions of cutting back on that any time soon. 

If I could turn back time...I really think I would be right here where I am right now.  I'm content and happy so that's all that matters.  It's funny thinking back how our first computer, an Amstrad 88 has taken me to here.  Well actually our very first computer was an Atari but one of our kids used it all the time, spending hours typing in code just to get a little ball bounce across the screen.  The Amstrad was different.  Our first internet set up was Internet in the Box and I learned Gopher, Pine and Linux.  It was unbelievable that I could easily talk to others half way around the would.  Those really were good days for going online.  They weren't as pretty but there were no worries about trojans, viruses and spam was almost unheard of.  There were great ICQ and bulletin boards.  I got to know the newsgroups.  It when I learned by trial and error how to create a homepage using a funny language called HTML.  My favourite operating system was Windows 3.1 and back then I was a die hard PC (Windows) user.  I got into internet security and privacy so learned a lot about that something that still helps today. One of our kids got me into Mac for home use although I was quite familiar with Apple through academia.  I made the move to Mac at home about 7 years ago and have never looked back although my current iMac is dual core so partitioned to use both Windows and Mac opperating systems. 

In terms of online activities at some times it would be nice to turn back time to a quieter, less intrusive time of being onlin; a time when trolls were dealt with accordingly with a few well placed LARRTs.  People respected online privacy and online stalking was a non-issue.  It was a time where people just wanted to connect and really it was the first form of online social networking.  I do miss those days!  But I enjoy these days too so won't be walking away from the internet.


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