Thinking about how the internet has changed things to the extent that kids now enter an entirely different world than people who were kids twenty-five or thirty years ago recalls how UM first affected me.

Growing up in the 1970s, I was one of the more bullied and picked on in the class. Until high school, I thought most of this was due to my family, who had some odd need to "put me in my place," (luckily not as completely as William Bradford Bishop!) and must have spread the word in school, so even people not in direct contact with my family heard something from somebody who was, so I didn't have a chance in that school.

This was one reason, and not even the main one, I agreed to transfer schools and attend a boarding school across the country where absolutely no one had met any member of my family, nor, in those pre-internet days, did anyone other than administration have any means of communicating with my family. To my surprise and dismay, I was treated even worse there than at home. (Freshman English required reading was Jane Eyre and they couldn't have made a better choice--it was truly out of the frying pan, into the fire.) I found myself in shock and disbelief that with no conditioning from my family, people treated me as bad and worse than in my hometown, but chalked most of it up to them being spoiled rich snots (about which I was mostly correct). I assumed I was being judged on appearance, how I looked/sounded, and welcomed the internet as not only finally a level playing field, but an advantage since I'd always been good with writing and not with looking and sounding in popular ways. Then the real shocks hit. By the time I got any alternative answers I was 45 and my life was pretty much on the skids anyway.

Anyhow, just a little observation, back in the "Good Old Days," one either had the choice of being defined by their own little narrow Puritan community or toughing it out in the wilderness. Print literature, radio, movies, and TV came as quite a shock and created the idea of a wider culture where one's true self might find acceptance. I was already a pretty established nervous wreck by the end of school--not only picked on in high school, but our college campus had the third highest crime rate in the country. So when Unsolved Mysteries came on, it confirmed any notions I might have harbored about the big bad world out there. Thing is, online you can be either publicly pilloried or lured to your doom more quickly than back in the day, when people were taught to listen to their own family and close friends and distrust strangers! Nobody safe after all. Just sayin'.