100 Things We've Lost to the Internet

by Pamela Paul

In its early days, the Internet offered ways for kids to try out new selves—to play with fantasy versions of themselves in online gaming, to experiment with gender identity in an anonymous forum, to invent an avatar and see if it might, in fact, be closer to one’s “real” self than the person everyone assumed you to be. But the Internet that emerged later on—data-driven, shared, permanent, profit-driven—quashed those earlier freedoms. Now a teenager from a religious family in rural Indiana will be discovered if he explores his sexuality online and may suffer appalling consequences. It seems harder to be a kid these days, and, later, harder to let that unhappy kid go.