The End of Love by Tamara Tenenbaum

Author:Tamara Tenenbaum [Tenenbaum, Tamara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798889660118
Published: 2023-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

When I started high school in 2002, the internet was beginning to form part of everyday life for many people belonging to the Argentinian middle class. I didn’t have a cell phone or any interest in having one (back then cell phones didn’t have internet connection, they were only useful for your mother to call you to find out where you were), but I spent all the time that primitive and noisy landline connection allowed to surf the internet, send emails, and chat on MSN or ICQ.62 “Frequently” generally meant an hour or two a day at most. Going online was not only expensive, but it also occupied the landline that my mother, a pediatrician, needed for work. Furthermore, we had—like most families I knew—only one computer that was in the living room I shared with my mother and sisters. The internet was an important part of my life, but an isolated one: a space that was separate from the rest and had clear limits. There was a moment in the day (it was actually during the night mostly) when I went online; the rest of the time I was simply offline. There was a clearly defined line between where the Web ended and real life began.

Browsing the internet was still complicated in those years. It did not have the supply of information it does today about any subject you can think of, and it wasn’t as easy to find that information as it is today. Despite these limitations, the internet became an ally in many ways for me during the first years at secular school, which were extremely tough. My reactions were clumsy when I was at school: my classmates talked about music I hadn’t heard of, food I hadn’t eaten, places I hadn’t been to. On the one hand, the internet allowed me to look for details of what they mentioned (and instantly pretend that I had always known what they were talking about), and on the other hand, it gave me time to think before talking, to embellish an anecdote, to not seem too enthusiastic nor too boring. The children of the turn of the millennium discovered something centennials would never notice, in the same way fish never think about water: the internet allowed us to control the image we showed to the rest of the world. It enabled a lie of course, but it also allowed us to interact with people without feeling exposed and gave us a kind of armor to protect us.

Many of us felt that this armor allowed us to be our true selves as the clumsy ones could become witty and the quiet ones could become funny. Without the obstacle of the body—which is always unpredictable and vulnerable, particularly when you are thirteen years old—those of us who were considered geeky had our second chance on Earth. Perhaps this is why we were the early adopters of the previous decade: in 2004, while I was browsing the internet for communities of likeminded people, those who were socially successful in the real world stayed in the real world.

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