Internet chat was honestly the dullest thing I had ever experienced. Hey dude, wazzup? Nuttin’ much. You eating nuts? I had a pizza for lunch. Lol. You got the hots for what’s in the box with the dots? ROFL. Did U C the new Lord of The Rings? Yeah, man, I thought it was rad. I like the book better. I agree ☺. So wat U up 2 tonite, then? Nuttin’ much.

I felt like I was tripping. I laugh, now. I mean, really, can you imagine Aaron Darc waltzing into these chat spaces and discussing the social ideology to be observed in the latest political scandal, or cultural fad? The looks on these peoples’ faces must have been a Kodak moment. You can understand the long silences that would follow, when someone would ask me how I’d been lately, and I would actually tell them – in great detail; or when someone would make an offhanded remark like, “I hate my mum, she sux”, and I would ask them why, and where this contempt originated.

I was honestly dumbfounded. I asked questions about themselves – real ones, about their real lives - all under the ridiculous assumption that in cyberspace, the anonyminity of identity, the vague shallow persona in something like a username, a tiny photo (if that), and a profile with eight boxes to tick about yourself, were all limitations that surely the first thing to do was break through. Little did I know that what I thought were limitations were actually shells for crabs who could no longer be bothered to be, couldn’t face, or didn’t feel equipped for experiencing life in any manner of depth, whatsoever. There’s a need – a very innate, human need – to interact with the external, but in 2006, externals can be threatening. We’re all just too anxious, I think. We’re trying to make the prison comfy, trying to adapt to some level of acceptable discontent, and protect us from anything that could pull the rug from under us and make our life any worse. These people weren’t using the opportunity of cyberspace to enrich their real lives - they were hiding from them. How dare I bring real life into cyberspace? And how dare I think? It challenges adapted perceptions, and stuff.

So averse to using their brains are most of these people, one etiquette of cyberspace that must be quickly learned to fit in, is that communication must be kept to a minimum of time and effort. It goes perfectly, functionally, with the emotional incapacity. Anything over a few words is pushing your luck - more than four sentences, and you’re likely to be attacked for “rambling”, or being demanding, or just straight out told you’re crazy. The rules are that they don’t have to answer your questions because you shouldn’t have been asking ones that took up so much space, in the first place. Mostly, they just disappear, silently. That’s the beauty of cyberspace for these people, and partly how it dysfunctionalises human beings – you can quite literaly disconnect, when the going gets tough. It spoils psychologically lazy people in this way, and maintains an adolescent impulse not to actually deal with anything. In cyberspace, you don’t have to. You can escape thinking (and causal reality), altogether, if you wish.

Even worse, to the younger generation coming through (remembering that while it does change slowly, it is still very much a youth-dominated world), such communication isn’t just not wanted – it’s completely foreign to them, altogether. The older generation don’t really fathom the reality of cyberspace; we are yet at a point where we have comprehended the way this new era completely changes our species. The little ball of human conciousness that is the newborn child is now being played with, shaped, and raised by an entirely new reality, with very different rules, circumstances and ideologies. We don’t comprehend it, because we were not raised on this technology. We belong to the old realm, and we do not see the difference between ourselves - who may very well adapt to cyberspace, but come to the party as people who are not products of it, psychologically -  and the kids who are, without any exaggeration, raised by it. Technology is yet to be credited with what it really did to our race, and how it did it. Technology is a kukoo bird, it has entirely usurped parental influence, and taken children away from parents, without them even realising. Technology and media (something enabled by technology) raise the new modern, western humans. It’s that simple. It’s truly psychologic. Hopscotch, hide and seek, school discos – all gradually becoming an insignificant part of the adolescent experience. Statistics show that children spend less and less time interacting with other children in the flesh, less time engaged with their parents, and less time engaging physical activity of any kind. Their plugged in, baby. They’ve been plugged in for so long now, they don’t even know of any other way. It’s their reality.

My brother, at 16, met, courted, and then later, dumped his first girlfriend, all on MSN. When I was 16, any kind of sexual interaction, letalone relationship, involved a lengthy social drama of great tension. There were weeks of glances on the schoolbus, of friends gossiping, of heartbroken diary entries, masturbation, and close calls at the blue light disco where I could never have the guts to make a move and end up back on my bed writing heartbroken diary entries. It was horrifying. And that’s the beauty of the net. When I explained to my little brother how different my first experiences were, he pitied me, and felt quite lucky to be a millenial kid. He had no idea what was so wrong with his, of course.

“It’s easy,” he said. The logic was clear - why would you not prefer a human interaction that was “easy”?

But this is precisely the problem. It’s just too big a temptation, cyberspace. Growing up hurts – it’s anxious, and it involves a lot of effort, and emotional endurance. How many hours of your adolescnece did you spend crying injustice, and wishing you were not enduring the anxiety of being a teenager? Probably, a lot of the time. You were probably a little whinging shit, like most teenagers.