This is a blog by Tina Jagla:
Me being on the internet started in Germany, in the summer of 2000 – I was 17 – when I was riding my bike the 7 kilometres to my friend’s place almost every day to explore this new and exciting wonder that was the internet. Swimming pools? Pah! We joined chat rooms, read (”The X-Files” and “Roswell High”) Fanfiction and even had a (not very successful) blind date with two guys from the next town.
The Tribe
It took me another year of constantly annoying my parents until we got internet access of our own. Very soon I joined my first community, the so-called UBB that was the message board belonging to the kiwi TV series “The Tribe”. I not only made friends (some of them I’m still in contact with today) but also enjoyed exclusive chats with the actors and some day in 2003, thanks to an online friend, I found myself in Berlin, actually meeting some of the actors in person, talking with them for two hours. Early Social Media Marketing at its best.
A friend invited me to join ciao.de, a consumer review platform for every product you can think of, so I was writing reviews, earning a few pennies a month, happy that it was “so easy” to earn money.
Around the same time my first and only website went online, publishing “The Tribe” Fanfiction. I marketed it on the UBB and other Fan-Communities, looking for the best authors, persuading them to publish on my website. The concept worked and the archive became and stayed High Quality even after I had to hand it over to an online friend as my working life had me in its grip. By now, sadly the site is offline for good.
“The Tribe” got cancelled and the community went downhill. I moved on to new hobbies and new communities. The German LARP scene was and still is organised over the internet and has born lots of different message boards until two years ago someone founded the Larper.ning, a community that has grown to 8,544 members to date, including me of course.
In 2005 I started personal blogging (“friends only”) on Livejournal.com, which I have kept up until today although I’m in my second account and friends have changed over the years.
And then, I can’t remember how it happened, it happened slowly and almost unrecognisable for me as I mostly have “geeky” friends but suddenly the internet was not just for geeks anymore. Facebook wasn’t a term anyone had heard of in Germany, yet, but I joined studivz in 2006, just like everyone else. Suddenly I was connected with old class mates and current uni mates.
Apart from that I used ICQ, MSN and later Skype to keep in touch. Free calls via the internet. Wow!
Then, a year ago, I moved to England and the world of Social Media became even bigger. Suddenly there was Facebook, which has so much more to offer than studivz and there was also Twitter. Youtube and Flickr suddenly weren’t just Filesharing platforms anymore but Social Media. My “mainstream” friends suddenly use iPhones and therefore have better internet access than I have though they are not using their options properly which makes me feel a bit better.
My whole understanding of the internet has changed in the last year and so I can look back on the last 10 years and say: Social Media isn’t new. I don’t know if it’s as old as the internet (probably) but it definitely existed when I first went online 10 years ago. The online community has just grown and the main audience has slightly changed. But what has helped “The Tribe” 9 years ago to build up a following of loyal and enthusiastic fans is today helping “Twilight” and even Coca Cola. Looking back at this development, it is unlikely that Social Media will ever become irrelevant. Yes, Facebook and Twitter might vanish but there will be other communities. Just wait and see.
By the way, I haven’t given up on fandoms. Today I’m following the actors of “Buffy” and “Dollhouse” on Twitter. Some things never change.
