My "Internet Eras" 2000-2022
The internet as a public space came into being in 1995 with the first web browser ever to be accessed, “Netscape”. It’s been 27 years since we were first able to dial up that modem and connect in real time with the rest of the world (well at least hypothetically at that point).
So, instead of giving you my 2022 Eras, I thought I’d go back and give you....
My Internet Era’s from as far back as I can recall, 2000-2022.
Thankfully, as you know with the Internet, there are receipts to help make this a lot easier. But some of the earlier stuff I’ve had to improvise a little, as the receipts are long since disposed of and buried. I’m sure some internet trolls somewhere could dig it up, but I’m not that important or public newsworthy for them to bother with.
So we’ll start with…
My MSN Era 2000-2003
So, yes the Internet was born in 1995 by Tim Berner’s Lee, but actually I didn’t really begin to access it until 2000, the year before 9/11. I’d done some web browsing before this, thanks to my dad and mum being into getting and accessing new technologies, but my MSN chats only really began in highschool, mainly because I was desperate for connection with people who didn’t know me.
School was not a fun time for me, I was severely bullied from primary school right through until about year 11. So I would chat to strangers on the internet, probably naively so, about hobbies and interests, and make faceless connections, where I could just be myself, or the person that I ideally wanted to be, but wasn’t necessarily that version of myself offline.
My Geocities Era 2004-2008
If you were online in the late nineties - early 2000’s you would have probably been building your own Geocities website. This platform was free to use, and my first venture into HTML coding. I remember being so excited the day I found a full sheet of Hex colour codes, and of course started experimenting immediately with background colour and font colour combinations like I was some sort of tech wizard lol. I can’t remember what my websites were even called, or what they were about sadly. If I’d hazard a guess, I’d say they were probably pretty boring and self-indulgent.
I even tried to search “Vikki Giles Geocities”, now my old spaces never came up, but I did find what was definitely a virus spam page called “Where should I put my booger?” - I imagine this could have been something I wrote back then and so I am now claiming it as part of my Internet History.
My “makeshift MySpace” Era 2009-2011
This was a very fun, very silly, edgy era. I didn’t have photoshop so I attempted to make cute pics and edit using Microsoft PAINT!!! Haha. I still remember some of the songs that I would link to my profile, from bands like Birds of Tokyo, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, My Chemical Romance… you know, this was also the peak of my Emo phase!
My “Internet Studies/Cyber Stalker/Facebook Wisecrack” Era 2012-2015
From this period of time, I had started my studies at Curtin University, majoring in Internet Communications and Marketing.
I really started to believe that everything that I wrote was prolific and mostly hilarious. I would post nearly daily “funny” statuses, leave subtle hints in my posts for my friends who knew the inside jokes, and I was really trying to make sense of what the Internet could do, what Social Media would do to build connections with people around the world.
I think I have written about this before but I can’t find the post anywhere, but in my time at Curtin I became slightly famous for having a library stalker. What??
Some guy took a photo of me in the library, then posted on a Facebook community chat, “anyone know this girl? She forgot her USB”. It’s fascinating to me that the commentary on this was very 20-teens memes and trolling the guy who shared it. But the reality for me, it’s probably why I would look over my shoulder constantly when I was at the library, and why I wouldn’t walk alone at the campus at night.
If it weren’t for my friend showing me this post and this community PSA, I probably wouldn’t have known about this, and the stalker may not have even existed in my reality. It would be like Shrodingers cat… Shrodingers stalker?
I feel grateful for social media for the very fact that a lot of this time of my life is well documented and easily searchable via my Facebook albums. I can go back to the pictures from these times and gladly enjoy the memories they hold.
My “Mummy Blog” Era 2019-2020
I have been blogging on and off since probably early in my “makeshift MySpace” era, but after my son Tobias was born, I wrote a blog post called “The 4 Things that helped me cope through pregnancy and giving birth”.
This blog post was something I wrote for a couple of reasons:
1) to help me remember the things that happened. Mum-brain is real and I just didn’t want to lose the record I had of those feelings and emotions around this time.
2) I thought that it might be beneficial for other mums-to-be or even mum’s with their own stories, to read about my experience and feel comfortable sharing theirs. It was off the back of a movement called the Positive Birth stories.
I had a lot of positive feedback for this and went on to write about 30 other posts since then. Only 17 (well 18 including this one!) of them I left ‘published’ because, again, I feel like a lot of what I write is purely self-indulgent and not actually remotely consumable by any audience.
In 2019, after the birth of my son Tobias, I decided that I wanted to try and get back to teaching Zumba again. I’d had a couple of years off. I knew I didn’t want to go back to working for a company to do this and Aleisha also wanted to do something new, and we both decided to give it a go! We started up Love Your Fitness (LYF) and set up a couple of classes a week, and people came. We love choreographing our own tracks and coming up with these fun and dancy workouts.
Covid hit in March 2020 and we attempted the online classes, but I was heavily pregnant at the time, about to pop. I think we kept going with this until a couple of weeks before my due date! While we were locked down from in-person classes, Social media helped us to still feel connected to the community.
We started a “Where to Zumba in Perth” community Facebook group, which has helped build connections between Instructors and Students throughout the periods we couldn’t teach in person, and still to this day has been the centre of organisation for this dance fitness community in Perth.
My “Social Justice” Era 2020-2022
Not that social justice is ever something that should be “just an Era”, but in terms of the Internet, this period of time, not only for me, but for the entire world, was I think one of the biggest periods in history that I can recall, in my lifetime, where justice was being served in spades on multiple platforms and multiple issues.
I am grateful to have been living in Perth, Western Australia at the time of the pandemic. Our covid case numbers were literally ‘0’ thanks to a hard border close and multiple lockdown periods. Our second son Finneas was born in April 2020 and we literally had all the time in the world to spend with him, while my partner and I could not go back to work until the hard lockdown was lifted at the end of June that year.
This was also a time when the Internet was our biggest tool to stay connected with one another, when we couldn’t meet in person, the conversations, the Zoom Calls, the posting, and the drama were all for the most part virtual, but with very real-word experiences and consequences.
Receipts were being posted, people were being called out and cancelled for bullying behaviour. And major organisations like entire Police departments were being called into question due to corruption and brutality. Unfair treatment and deaths of people - George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery were being magnified. Their absolutely tragic deaths were made a global issue, this was the time when the world was posting black tiles and Black Lives Matter information was being shared virally.
I took both of my boys with a friend, Colette, to the Women’s march in March 2021, to stand up for the justice of Indigenous women in custody against police brutality, and to fight for the rights of women’s stories to be heard and believed in the court of law.
It saddens me to think that some things have gone backwards since then, including the Abortion law changes in America, in fact many things that have slipped backwards about 50 years have happened in America, but still Australia is a country that is - to this day - guided by a lot of what comes out of the US, so it does leave me feeling uneasy.
My “Social Media Detox” Era Jan 2022-March 2022
In early January 2022, I was feeling really worn out. As a mum and a business owner and also trying to get back to full time work because my so-called business was just a “side-hustle” hobby. I was finding myself scrolling a lot leading up to this time, but rarely finding anything meaningful or constructive to post. Even for the business. I didn’t want to constantly be promoting the classes, I felt a real waning interest in those types of posts. “Get fit with us” really just wasn’t the message people were wanting to hear in late 2021-early 2022. As much as I love Zumba, I was just over telling the world about it.
So I took myself offline. Literally deleted my Facebook and Instagram apps. Funnily enough, I had only in the past few months started being active on Tiktok, and I kept that App, deleting it and re-adding it from time to time, but that was actually the only platform I was posting on during this time, and it was usually just funny, just silly, fluffy and enjoyable content (at least enjoyable for me).
I have since reactivated, but I’ve set myself up with some boundaries. I’m no longer posting out of obligation, or keeping to “schedules” times of day when I think my posts will “do well”. I’m just posting what I feel I want to post, when I feel I want to post it.
If it’s been 2 weeks, no posts? That’s absolutely fine. If I go through a day where I feel like spamming you with memes, that’s what I’m going to do!
So that then bleeds into…
My “TikTok Experimental Dance Meta” Era Early 2022- Present
Most of the content I’m creating these days is going up on TikTok, and I’m occasionally sharing it on Instagram / Facebook. I feel like I can be a bit more loose and silly on this platform.
I do have to chill out on the scrolling, and put myself and my phone on lockdown from time to time. But I am enjoying this Era. I feel like I’m posting more of myself than I have before. I’m getting more confident in Video. I used to HATE video. But there is a lot of fun to be had in editing, using different AI filters and getting more ‘meta’ with it.
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So, this has been fun! Thanks for reading. Share with me your ‘Eras’ and stay social:
TikTok @vikki_a_g
Instagram: @vikki.a.gee
Email: msg.vikkigiles@gmail.com
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