Tech Intro

I suppose I will have to go with the rather overly-obvious answer and claim "The Internet" as my most formative technology (though it's tempting to claim the microwave oven and laud the joys of popcorn). More specifically, the parts of the internet used to communicate. The earliest memories of the internet that I am able to dredge up are of ICQ, a chatting program that I recall as being popular with my peers as a preteen. I also joined various forums as I grew up--I discovered that I could communicate with a whole lot of people, many of them very far away, and many of them way more interesting than my fellow preteens. Their most interesting function was as beings sharing my interest in watching, reading, and writing sci-fi and fantasy, but I'm sure I couldn't enumerate the other things I picked up along the way (though an important one is certainly that my first forum was also the first place I met someone claiming the title "lesbian", though I barely knew what that meant and certainly didn't know how important it was going to be for me).

As I warped into my teenage years, my responsibilities increased, as did my circle of real-life friends, and I drifted away from the forums. They were, of course, eventually replaced by Facebook, where I could keep track of the real-life friends who were close by or far away, but that is, perhaps, a story for another time...