My life on the screen

Since the internet came to my life it has played an important role in my relationships.

It all started in the year 2000 when I was a big fan of the Britpop music. None of my friends were fond of it so I started browsing the internet in order to look for people interested in Britpop singers and bands.

I started logging to an English-speaking chat room of the music band "The London Suede". One day I asked if someone was from Latin America. A girl replied “Me! I am from Mexico”. She recommended me  a yahoo group constituted by Spanish speaking Suede fans.

I immediately signed up, and started commenting about the songs and the band with people from Spain, Chile, Argentina and México. It was really fun and enriching to find people with my same music preferences.

Two years later, the group migrated to a forum named "El Club de Suede en Español" (The Suede Club in Spanish) where we discussed about other groups, and gradually, about other things too.  We talked about our daily activities, our love life, our problems, our looks (since we started uploading our real photos) and other personal matters. 


Later on, and with the arrival of MySpace and Facebook and our daily use of IM, the Suede club started to loose its importance until it was finally closed.

Throughout this 10 years the people from the Suede club have become part of my closest friends and  I have met face-to-face with almost all of them when we have had the chance. Two guys from Spain came to my country on vacations, and the girls located in different towns nearby have visited my city and stayed at my place several times. I even went with one of them to London for the last concerts of Suede in 2003.

In Turkle (2004) words, I have experienced my sense of self in terms of “multiple windows and parallel lives”.  I explored online my particular interest for music bands that were not popular in my offline environment. I  expressed my thoughts in bulletin boards and newsrooms while interacting with real people and new ideas.  I received and shared not only  information about music, but advices, personal histories and happy memories that transformed my social life and my multiple selves.

REFERENCES

Turkle, Sherry. (2004) ‘Wither psychoanalysis in computer culture.’ In Kaplan, D.M. (ed) Readings in the philosophy of technology. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp.415-429.