Saturday, November 26, 2005
AussieMOO: The Fountain of Youth
Discussing the issues of Internet use by children in my last post reminded me of my own Internet journeys while young. It was 1996, I was age 11, and I was being home-schooled for Grade 6.
It was that year that I really discovered the Internet in depth.
In particular, I discovered MOOs: neat virtual worlds where one could chat with others and extend the virtual reality by programming whatever the mind could conceive. Unfortunately, the mind was fully capable of conceiving age discrimination. Thus, I visited one MOO and was soundly ignored by 50% of its citizens and cosseted by the other 50% for being age 11. I was ready to say piss on the Internet, but I thought I'd give another MOO a try before making the decision.
That MOO was AussieMOO. Except this time, the boy wasn't 11 years old. He was 19. And he was accepted.
I spent about a year there and it was there I really learned to love programming. And you know what? I *never* *ever* thought someone was pulling the same trick I was. I thought they were all truly old and wise. Isn't this scary? I was deceiving others, but couldn't fathom they were doing the same to me. This is the best reason I can think of for educating young kids and teenagers about the Internet instead of just banning it.
Now, as I look back on it, I don't know who those people were. They could have been anyone. That is, after all, half the fun of the Internet: no-one knows you're a dog, and all that. But a funny thought occurred to me: what if everyone else on AussieMOO was a pre-teen, pretending to be otherwise to get acceptance?
What a weird place, that Internet.
It was that year that I really discovered the Internet in depth.
In particular, I discovered MOOs: neat virtual worlds where one could chat with others and extend the virtual reality by programming whatever the mind could conceive. Unfortunately, the mind was fully capable of conceiving age discrimination. Thus, I visited one MOO and was soundly ignored by 50% of its citizens and cosseted by the other 50% for being age 11. I was ready to say piss on the Internet, but I thought I'd give another MOO a try before making the decision.
That MOO was AussieMOO. Except this time, the boy wasn't 11 years old. He was 19. And he was accepted.
I spent about a year there and it was there I really learned to love programming. And you know what? I *never* *ever* thought someone was pulling the same trick I was. I thought they were all truly old and wise. Isn't this scary? I was deceiving others, but couldn't fathom they were doing the same to me. This is the best reason I can think of for educating young kids and teenagers about the Internet instead of just banning it.
Now, as I look back on it, I don't know who those people were. They could have been anyone. That is, after all, half the fun of the Internet: no-one knows you're a dog, and all that. But a funny thought occurred to me: what if everyone else on AussieMOO was a pre-teen, pretending to be otherwise to get acceptance?
What a weird place, that Internet.
