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Tech

Growing Up in the Digital Sweet Spot

Our new assistant editor, Louise Matsakis, talks about giving up the internet as a teenager.

I grew up during the sweet spot of the digital age. I'm old enough to have had a flip phone, but too young to remember the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Instagram (thankfully) didn't exist when I was in middle school, but Facebook would be ubiquitous by the time I took the SAT.

I experienced childhood when the internet could still fade into the background. It functioned like an understated kind of magic. I sensed Google was smart enough to answer any question I might have, but lacked the foresight to understand how the web would one day have the power to influence my emotions.

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Right as I became a full-fledged teenager, I got my first laptop. I no longer had to lock myself inside my mom's office to use hers. Soon after, my life fell apart. A depression so strong washed over me that I mostly couldn't make it to school. Like other isolated teens, I logged onto social media.

My life became consumed by late-night Facebook chats to other nerdy debate kids in nearby towns. I carefully edited selfies taken on Photobooth and repeatedly posted the link to my Formspring profile, a now defunct social network.

When I couldn't sleep, I scrolled through Facebook. I talked to dozens of people a day and organized extensive group chats about things like politics. I recorded rambling videos in my pajamas and posted them on my friends' walls.

A year or two later, the depression became too much. It's hard to say whether my internet-connected laptop, which I kept next to me in my bed each night, improved or damaged my fragile state. It was at once my only lifeline and an anxiety-inducing machine I couldn't turn off. I soon got help and spent an entire year almost completely offline.

When I got back on the internet, I began to think about how sites like Facebook changed me, and everyone I knew. I started to sense that the internet wasn't just a digital mirror of real life. It is its own universe, with its own rules. I realized it was powerful enough to shape our identities in ways I couldn't yet understand.

By the time I got to college, I knew I wanted to spend my career documenting life online. I talked to the leaders of strange internet communities, exposed what happens when a social network breaks, and called out the most powerful companies in the world for censoring the platforms we rely on to experience the web.

Ultimately, I want to chase stories intended not just for the hacker wonderkids or the obsessive geeks, but for people like me, who took the internet for granted until it changed them forever.

After a previous stint at Motherboard as an Editorial Fellow, I'm thrilled to be back full-time. Send tips and story ideas to louise.matsakis@vice.com.

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