I Had an Onion On My Belt

It’s hard not to sound like an internet hipster when I talk about the web. I’ve been a part of message boards and online communities since 1998 or so, and I am a bit prone to rolling my eyes when someone tells me about some newfangled thing they’ve just discovered online that I’ve been doing for the past ten years.

But I had a recent, slightly horrifying realization: I am in danger of going from internet hipster to internet fuddy-duddy. This occurred to me the day I said something along the lines of, “I don’t know about this Tumblr business. What can it do that Twitter can’t?”

Replace Tumblr with, oh, 8-tracks and Twitter with records, and I’m a grouchy old lady wanting to know what’s wrong with how we did things in my day.
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I decided that 31 is too young to be old, so I’ve been making an effort these last few weeks to explore the newer parts of the Internet. I signed up for Tumblr. I subscribed to a bunch of YouTube channels. I’m still holding out on Pinterest, but I’ve convinced myself that’s due to my very non-visual nature (I’m a words girl) rather than my age.

But Twitter is still my first love, and I think I’m just going to have to come to terms with being a little bit stuck in 2009. Still, I’m going to try to stay on top of the new stuff, just to make sure I’m not telling anyone to get off my lawn quite yet. I’m not ready to be an internet has-been. Even though I remember the day the IT guy at work told me I should try this great new search engine called Google. How many of you remember life without Google?

What websites are the next big thing in your neck of the internet? And what virtual year are you trapped in?

(The title of this post is from one of my all-time favorite lines from The Simpsons, in which Grandpa Simpson is explaining how things were in his day. The fact that I had to explain that to those of you who weren’t allowed to watch The Simpsons when that episode aired is making me feel old. And the image is the Google logo from 1998, shortly before I started using it as my search engine.

Now you kids get off my lawn.)

- Sarah