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Notebook:I don't really spend the whole of my free time on the Net, but god knows I spend enough. I run a handful of blogs, do most of my communicating via email, do a lot of commenting (and, as of the end of February, some administration) at Metafilter, get my daily comics in indie- and web- form, &c. It is more than an idle time-killer: it is a platform for fun and productivity. And I'm not exactly alone in this.
I associate the Internet with my adolescence. In 1993, when consumer Internet access was really first starting to pop, I was 14, getting into high school, and starting to try to crawl out of my shell of crippling shyness. My family got dial-up access around that time, and I got hooked on USENET and the (awful, primitive) early Web. I joined a BBS. I fell in with computer nerds at school and learned to program. I made fledgling efforts toward basic web design. I put dirty words and a construction.gif on my homepage.
When I first met my wife, we became long-distance geek friends, exchanging complicated wordplay emails in the evenings. In college, I worked for an internet startup firm. Last year, I organized and released a compilation album coordinated solely via Metafilter contacts. As I have gotten older, so has the Net, and the distance between those early awkward days in 93-94 and the sort of whole-life usefulness of the modern Web is stunning. There's a temptation to romanticize this lockstep development, the co-education of Josh Millard and his net, but that's verging into the weird. Suffice it to say that I'm keenly aware of the fact that I've grown up during the birth and evolution of something new, and enjoy that perspective.
A song like this is a confession and an anthem together: yes, I dick around on the computer an awful lot. I'm neither proud nor ashamed, and at the same time I'm both, and that's the short of it for god knows how many people at this point in history. Being a nerd has gone from anathema to chic and has settled back between at a new equilibrium: no one can slag computer nerds quite the way they used to, because it turns out we were kind of right. Curious, that.