I moved households a few times when I was younger: from my birthplace, Baguio, to the heart of Manila, the coastal part of Cavite, and to a suburb in Bacoor. While some homes felt more familiar than others, I had distinct memories of each. Most of them involved friends. I grew up with the thought that each time we’d move, I’d never see the same set of friends ever again. Sometimes the pangs of being free to visit each place would enter my mind, and I thought it would be a good idea-until the time that I actually attempted to do it. I realized that I could never really return to the homes I had lived in, because they will never be exactly the same as I left them, or vice versa.
I felt the same way when talking to strangers on the internet. It didn’t matter that we might not be able to talk again. It felt exciting to live in the ephemeral and the anonymous.
The first time I had a memorable conversation on the internet was on the official Eragon website circa 2006. As part of its promotional campaign, the fantasy novel series-turned-box-office-flop had this great idea of hosting a website where people who kissbrides.com echa un vistazo a este sitio web clicked on the same things would fall in the same chatroom, two people at a time. I never was a fan of Eragon , so I don’t remember the specific things I had to do to “match” with someone (the system had something to do with virtues and dragon eggs?), but after a few minutes, there I was, saying my first hello. “Hi,” the person on the other end said. So went a good 30 minutes of our talking about where we’re from (she was from Adelaide), how old we were (I was two years younger), a little bit about the books we’d read (she couldn’t believe I hadn’t read Eragon yet), and then on about how we lived and how it was where we are. Questions you normally wouldn’t ask to someone you haven’t met in person yet.
As admins, we treated it like a blog, asking questions and just talking about our day under code names
But this was the time of the wild internet, where everything was in an amorphous state, and you never knew if you would end up ever meeting IRL, let alone talk again. Not on this platform. I felt that we were both afraid to give away too much, in case the person on the other end of the line would turn out to be a total creep, but we were also too trusting to become anyone else than who we were. She said goodbye, I closed the window, and that was that.
Before social media, the thought of keeping in touch with strangers online for me could only happen in video games. I used to play Endless Online, a e that was already outdated even then. It was one of the few games my PC could handle, and with only a few thousand players at the time, it wasn’t that hard to end up striking a conversation with someone. I remember joining a Facebook-like social media platform designed for kids called Matmice, and by the time I shifted to Ragnarok Online, I had joined Friendster and then Facebook.
Poking was still a thing
I was about to graduate high school when the Facebook craze started. People treated it the same way they did Friendster: adding strangers and posting on each other’s walls. Everything was innocent. I don’t remember how it happened, but I ended up becoming an admin of one of those corny Facebook pages that were named after statements.