Being present on the internet
I grew up pretty online. I spent a lot of time on Neopets, Yahoo Messenger, Runescape, and Club Penguin, with some dabbling in AOL messenger, as a child and tween, if that tells you anything about my demographic. Later on, throughout my early teens, I spent a considerable amount of time on MOCpages.com, a now-defunct social network where kids and adults shared LEGO creations. A little later I started spending time on DeviantArt, and at some point during middle or high school I got on Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram and Tumblr.
Then, in college, I fell off of all social medias—because for once I felt socially satisfied and nurtured where I was. Within a couple years of graduating, I had deleted pretty much all of my social media accounts. Not coincidentally, this was during a time in which I started learning about surveillance capitalism and how companies use and sell our data. I started researching privacy-friendly alternatives to major websites and programs.
In the last year, while I have continued to adopt more secure internet habits, I also decided to return to social media.