Group Discussion

Reminiscing about how the Internet used to be striked up a very interesting conversation about different encounters and experiences about our first time using the Internet.


http://biancabrunettecom336.blogspot.com: Bianca's experience was kind of funny, but very serious. She talked about when she was younger, she was an avid AOL Messenger user (as was the whole group), and she was talking to someone in the chat rooms. The person asked Bianca a rather disturbing question, but at the time she really didn't understand what it meant. She asked her mom about what it meant, and Bianca was banned from using AOL. She also talked about A/S/L, which means age, sex, and location. I found that we all had the AOL Messenger aspect in common and we had some bad experiences from them. During the group conversation, it was ironic how we used the messenger when we were younger, and now we don't really use it anymore.  Bianca also talked about the AOL discs that you would get in the mail every time AOL needed to be updated. 

http://cyberrebel9.blogspot.com: Katherine talked about how she played a lot of games online, especially the ones on Cartoon Network. There was a Batman game that she really enjoyed, but she just couldn't beat it. In the end, she asked her dad to help her beat it because she became so frustrated with not being able to win the game. Games were a hot topic in the group as well. We talked about Oregon Trail, which I'm sure everyone has played at least once when they were a kid. Also, Mavis Beacon was a popular game. It was a typing game to help you better your typing skills. 

Some other things that we talked about was that dial up was very slow, and that everything is faster now. Also, the use of chat speak. The most used by everyone was probably "lol". It was interesting to find out that we don't really use it anymore, and that people older than us (parents, etc) now use it more that we do.