Lifelong surfer of the world wide web
Recently, I took my very first surfing lesson and tweeted “after decades of surfing nothing but the world wide web, i’m finally tackling the waves.” I was a hilariously bad first-time surfer of the ocean, but I’m a pretty experienced and cynical surfer of the information superhighway, and so it made me wonder, where did that phrase come from? A quick search reveals that librarian Jean Polly coined the phrase:
I wanted something that expressed the fun I had using the internet, as well as hit on the skill, and yes, endurance necessary to use it well… I also needed something that would evoke a sense of randomness, chaos, and even danger.
When I think of surfing the web, I’m also reminded of a Scholastic children’s book that I remember seeing around the school library as a kid. It’s called Internet. On the cover, a diverse group of youth are pictured surfing computer keyboards and looking hyped to enter the new frontier of cyberspace.
The book is still easy to find, and a few years ago, I bought a copy and prominently displayed it on my own office bookshelf. Maybe to remind myself that my early teenage Internet forays formulated direct paths to many of my adult life experiences (friendships, jobs). Also, the book is just a hoot to read in 2024. Here are some of its pre-9/11 inside pages.
Look how hypnotized the girl in the above picture looks. She’s hooked. I suppose that’s another reason why the phrase “surfing the web” was used at the time. Teachers and librarians worried that the Internet would be seen as a geeky educational tool, so they hoped that by associating it with surfing, it would seem cooler and motivate young people to use it. No need. For the girl above, for me, and many other teens at the time, we immediately recognized the Internet as a place for both creativity and a chance to quietly be up to no good. And the kids who were often most excited by the Internet were the oddballs and outsiders—kids who found something lacking in their high schools, towns, or families, so the idea of entering a portal somewhere else was very enticing.
’s pieces for The New Yorker are all excellent, but I really love this one, Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Internet. He nails what it was like being a teenager during the days of the early Internet and the way experiences in those spaces (AIM chats, LiveJournal, Ragnarok forums, and Geocities pages) cultivated a sense of confidence and self-worth that you didn’t yet have in your offline life. And his droll tone captures some of the absolute weirdness of the era. Some personal favorite lines:I pestered Parker to make me a blog, too. She eventually agreed and hosted it as a subdomain on her own URL, which in retrospect was emblematic of the power dynamic between us.
Talking in the forums, to players I knew only by their pseudonyms and avatars, was the first time in my life that I felt like other people were interested in my opinions.
I was hooked; there are years of my life from which I have more memories of playing Ragnarok than I do of going to school.
Of course, this era is long over, with the 2010s came the rise of Instagram and Twitter, and with that, a significant performative shift in everyone’s online presence. Soon, platforms would be driven by algorithms, by engagement, etc etc, you know all this, and now that we’re well into the 2020’s, many people have hit a wall of total exhaustion with it all.
I’m around Chayka’s age, and I often wonder, will I ever have the feeling I had during the early days of the Internet, what he describes as a “sense of creative possibility and even of self-definition.” These days, it’s rare when I feel those things in most online spaces, but I can’t only blame the algorithm or my exhaustion with the latest Twitter discourse. It’s also getting older, and being swept up in productivity culture as much as the next person, the latter of which the Internet has directly brought about. It’s hard to imagine getting lost in customizing a LiveJournal theme, or carefully hand coding a website with candy-colored scroll bars just for kicks, because, sadly I don’t do many things anymore without wondering what their purpose is, or if they’re the most optimal use of my time. It’s telling that the famous Mary Oliver line, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” has been used as a call to hustle, when its actual context expresses the opposite of that. It’s a call to literally touch grass and idle a day in nature.
Anyway, for all the “let’s go back to LiveJournal” jokes I’ve seen since Twitter’s slow death, I actually don’t want to go back to LiveJournal. I loved LiveJournal, but as all the failed revivals of old television shows and movies have shown, any serious attempts to return to a nostalgic place ring hollow and only emphasize that you can’t return to that time. But maybe you can take aspects of what you loved about LiveJournal and bring them to something new. What that new era of the Internet is, I don’t know, though I do feel we’re in some transitory phase.
Whatever that phase is, I’ll be waiting. It only takes one surfing lesson to quickly learn that the key to it, as with most sports, is endurance. Same with the Internet. I’m a lifelong rider, and even when I think I’ve had enough, or that whole thing has lost all its fun, I’ll always be back out there, jaded and paddling, for the brief thrill of riding a good wild wave.