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Post by Moose on Jan 2, 2015 22:21:07 GMT
I was thinking recently about how much I enjoy the internet and things such as facebook, message boards and indeed mobile phones with text messaging. And then that set me thinking about whether I would have liked them had they been availble when I was fifteen. In some ways yes I think I would - I used to spend hours on the phone to my friends each evening - if I wasn't seeing them - and I think it would have been great to have been able to text them. But - there is also a nasty side to it. I wonder how it would have felt to be cyber bullied - to find myself defriended, or even to see myself being anonymously slagged off on one of the many sites that seem to go in for such things. And I think it would have been utterly demoralising and something very difficult to cope with. Do teenagers today just see it a normal? (Kate? )
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Post by Mari on Jan 3, 2015 10:17:12 GMT
In the last years of my high school life, much social life already took place on MSN and Hyves. I was very late to join (since we had dial up internet for a very long time), so I sometimes felt quite left out. On the other hand, the friends I had were real friends. I think for teenagers it's very confusing who are your real friends because distance and interest is hard to gauge on things like Facebook. Clicking like is easy, but that doesn't mean people actually like it or you. People liking your things a lot could result in you thinking they are your friends when they are not. I really don't mind not having had those connections in my early teens. It's hard enough to figure out who your friends are in real life.
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Post by Moose on Jan 3, 2015 19:51:59 GMT
Yeah. I was thinking a lot about the sites that exist now whereby people can anonymously 'rate' their classmates and make unkind comments about them. That must be absolutely devastating.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2015 0:08:54 GMT
When I was a teenager, most of us still had the slow dial-up and the "social networks" were MSN or ICQ. I didn't use those, though. Some kids made their own, little homepage.
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Post by tangent on Jan 10, 2015 0:22:34 GMT
Computers didn't exist when I last had school friends.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 10, 2015 18:42:11 GMT
People at my age like talking about how you could have lunch while the computer downloaded a picture.
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Yuki
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Post by Yuki on Jan 15, 2015 10:22:30 GMT
At the age of 15 we had Internet at home but it was slow and expensive (we had to pay by hourly usage), so I was using it mostly to check some information or watch porn (what? Isn't that the whole purpose of the Internet? ). I spent my teens thinking I was the only atheist in Morocco, so I think I would have found other people more easily if the Internet was more accessible, and social networks like facebook were available at the time. Chances are, I would have probably ended up not joining English forums, including EF, and my English wouldn't have improved beyond school level, since one of my main motivations for improving my English was communicating efficiently with other atheists.
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Post by Kye on Jan 15, 2015 13:03:11 GMT
God works in mysterious ways...
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Yuki
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Post by Yuki on Jan 15, 2015 13:36:29 GMT
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Post by Miisa on Jan 15, 2015 17:07:50 GMT
I was in my twenties when the internet and mobile phones became a real thing to most people.
Byt looking at my kids now, one 16 and the other 11, they have grown up with it and remember nothing else. They move pretty smoothly in that world. That said, one hears about Facebook bullying, or even WhatsApp bullying, though I think also those are becoming better as they are starting to be taken seriously by the authorities, and they will intervene to have a discussion with the parties even if the people involved are too young to participate.
Kids have the capacity to be cruel in any medium.
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Post by Moose on Jan 16, 2015 1:25:05 GMT
True .. though I think the internet provides a wider scope. In a way your kids are a guinea pig generation - they do not remember a time before the internet and yet the regulations that I feel will come to the net (whether I want them to or not) in time are not yet in place.
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Post by juju on Jan 16, 2015 16:23:21 GMT
I'd hate to be a teenager now, for lots of reasons. I think there's so much more pressure on young people these days. Having said that, I often think I still have a mental age of 16. And I'd love that much energy back - not to mention less wrinkles...
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Post by tangent on Jan 17, 2015 14:41:10 GMT
You didn't have any wrinkles when I saw you at Jo's last year, juju.
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Post by juju on Jan 17, 2015 18:39:36 GMT
Too many Mooseritas must have affected your vision!
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Post by tangent on Jan 17, 2015 22:52:06 GMT
Maybe, I can't remember.
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Post by yooperguy on Dec 13, 2015 0:05:25 GMT
My teenage years were a hoot. As far as technology is concerned, the first 4 function calculator came out after I graduated high school.
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Post by tangent on Dec 13, 2015 23:25:18 GMT
Was it a Babbage differential engine?
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Post by yooperguy on Dec 13, 2015 23:35:57 GMT
I had to look that up. Nah it was a couple years after that.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 17, 2015 21:03:12 GMT
We were bullied in our village since the local pastor spread the rumour that we were members of a cult. If there had been social networks like today, it probably would have spread beyond anything I would like to imagine. But the Internet helped my English as well. I found pen pals there and then the forums. I never studied for writing English, I just posted in forums a lot and got better results than many students I studied with.
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Post by robert on Jul 26, 2018 11:18:06 GMT
The only thing for me that would've been different is I could've expanded my D&D campaigns to include far more people.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2018 11:56:45 GMT
The only thing for me that would've been different is I could've expanded my D&D campaigns to include far more people. Hi Robert, what's D&D?
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Post by robert on Jul 26, 2018 12:05:52 GMT
Dungeons and Dragons...the famous role playing game.
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Post by Moose on Aug 26, 2018 23:50:53 GMT
My ex used to be into that. It looked fun to me but I never entirely got the hang of it. Perhaps I let my virginity go too soon.
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Post by Mari on Aug 27, 2018 6:14:12 GMT
I participated once. It was fun, but I died a lot.
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Post by Elis on Aug 27, 2018 9:19:36 GMT
I participated once. It was fun, but I died a lot. You died a lot? And I used to think one could only die once.
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Post by robert on Aug 27, 2018 10:17:20 GMT
That was the great thing about Dungeons and Dragons. One could just make a new character if you died. Though it was easy in the early rules. Later rules made character creation like a lengthy process. I spent a few hours one time creating a character according to the newer rules on a campaign.
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Post by whollygoats on Sept 3, 2018 18:06:42 GMT
Heh...Teenager? Well, I think that depends a lot upon subjective experience in those years. Mine started bad with the separation of my parents, while my mother was institutionalized, so it was pretty downer all the way around. But, as that decade fishtaled along the road of life, it turned out to be something of a positive, living on my own as a teenager much of the time (since my mother was institutionalized) made me a fair amount more 'responsible' than many of my cohort companions. I thought my latter teens were blissful, as I discovered the opposite gender and got plenty of positive feedback in the exploration of that discovery. In my day, tools like we see today were the pipedreams of crackpot comic strip writers. The phone was rotary and always stationary, although it might have had a really long cord. There were telephone boxes everywhere and they tended to be trafficked by dubious characters. In my younger years, most telephones were 'party lines', where multiple trunk callers might use the same line and therefore be able to overhear the conversations of other trunk callers on their line.
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Post by kingedmund on Sept 14, 2018 1:27:32 GMT
Sorry to hear this whollygoats!
Well. I don't miss my teenage years. I hated my father but I don't these days. He valued everything else except his kids. Was Abusive and loved to use his power and influence to control his family. Emancipated myself from him when I was 14. Nowadays, I just pity him and forgave him, to much energy to hold onto the past. My mother was always busy with her thing so grandmother raised me mostly.
My 20's was fun. I traveled, built my world up without help from family. I had a bad first marriage the stuff you could turn into a hallmark movie as most of my life could be but prefer not to. My ex husband was thrilling, exciting, fun, a CEO, loving in his own way..... until he didn't get what he wanted. Left on disasterous terms which is a story in itself. Now I am friends with him even though he has tried to win me back over the years. (Never again of course). My current husband is wonderful. Have enjoyed life even though I've had some struggles in my adult life ..... it's still way better than the teenager years!
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Post by Alvamiga on Sept 19, 2018 17:36:48 GMT
I'd liked to have had at least the basics. There's a lot of people I've lost contact with who I would rather not have.
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Post by kingedmund on Sept 29, 2018 2:34:42 GMT
I used to be that way. Now I have reconnected with my past. I don't mess with worry anymore.
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