by miss nobody

Created on: April 26, 2008

The Internet completely changed my life. Period.

I was a divorced mother of 2 living in England at the time, and I bought a second hand computer from a friend who was upgrading and in 1998 I not only got a computer, I went on the Internet.

Then it was scary.

We did not have any of the social networking sites that are around today like MySpace and Facebook. Back then it was IRC (Internet relay chat) and different chat rooms. I always visited family chat rooms (safer) and talked with people across the Atlantic. This was exciting and this was a new world.

I got to know a few people who lived in England and some who lived in the United States. And then in early 1999 I got talking to a man in Canada who completely changed my life. My sons and I moved to Canada to start a new life with this man and 8 years later we are still married and loving being in Canada.

Without the social part of the internet in the chat rooms that would never have happened.

But it doesn't stop there.

For a while I kept in touch with friends at home, and made new friends, on ICQ (I seek you) and MSN messenger, but friends had to know your email address or ICQ number to find you. It wasn't that easy to find a friend that you did not know these things about.

Then came MySpace and Facebook and the social networking site just exploded!

I'm blown away every time I log onto Facebook (and YES it is addictive and I log on every day) and find that yet another friend from school or from England has found me! I have made contact with people from my school days, and believe me at 50 years old that was a long time ago.

It also helps in not feeling so isolated in another country. After all the Internet transcends boundaries such as countries. I can look into my friends photos on Facebook and see what they did yesterday or vacation last summer.

Used correctly social networking sites are a very positive part of the Internet. However, there is another side to this where we find cyber bullying happening through sites such as Facebook. There will always be a negative side to things but I know that the police and schools are active in stamping out cyber bullying and at least in Ontario it is an offence even if done from home about a school member. In my son's school 60+ students were questioned by the police over a bullying site on Facebook and intervened to close down the group and suspend and expel the culprits. Yes, my son, in his stupidity of getting carried away online, was one of them, and hopefully has learnt a lesson.

For the most part, thanks to social networking sites the world is becoming smaller and we are all interacting for the good. You just have to not get too carried away and maintain a sense of awareness.

Social networking is here to stay, and is a fantastic way of communicating worldwide.

Let's hope it changes the world for the better and that we all learn to communicate better and bring down barriers of race, religion etc.

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