The internet arrived in my home as a window, an enchanted portal cut into ordinary domestic space. A window is fixed in place. “I’m going online” meant you were heading to a specific place in the house, along the lines of “I’ll be in my room” or “I’m going to the attic.” To peer into the internet, I had to sit in my parents’ maroon computer chair. To my left, through the non-metaphorical window, I could see telephone wires running down the street, carrying away my messages.
I was born into a world that contained telephones just as it contained stones and trees. The internet differed from the telephone in its unvoicedness, but they shared a familiar infrastructure. It was physical and placed. There was a here that somebody had connected with copper wire to a there.
Then came AOL Instant Messenger. It was an awful place for middle schoolers, but there we were anyway, a swarm of screennames in chatrooms, my own (PyRoAnGeL5) among them. Suddenly, school life ran on two channels, what happened at school and what happened at school at home.
Still, you could leave.
You could stand up, walk away from the computer, step back into your body and your house. In fact, you had to. Our digital lives were structured by departures.

– Laura J. Martin

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