I’m in kinda of a weird position in regards to pop culture and the internet. I did, in fact, grow up in the 90s. I’m a millenial without a doubt. I got all the hallmarks of the generation save the avocado toast, expensive coffee drinks, and exposure to era-defining pop-culture and internet spaces. I was homeschooled, you see, so the only kids I interacted with where our monthly “co-op” days where all the affiliated Christian families would get together to socialize their children with other god-fearing families and hold regular meetings about permissable skirt length and if a sleeveless blouse was too scandalous to allow into a building with their children. So I missed out on all the kinds of pop-culture stuff you get by being exposed to a school’s worth of children. Instead of that, I had the kids of half a dozen incredibly conservative families (even in comparison to my own family) to spend time with and one thing I will say about having escaped that kind of life is that they’re all so boring. I’m sure plenty of them went wild as teens eventually, but as kids? We just talked about whatever christian films our parents let us watch, VeggieTales, and our school work. I didn’t know what a forum was until I was in high school, in the late 00s, even though I went to gameFAQs all the time when I was younger for game guides. Somehow I missed the entire forum part of that website. And even when I did get online, it was only for the super-niche things I got pre-approved by my parents since the computer was in the family room and going to websites that weren’t pre-approved was asking to get your computer privileges revokes.

Which means the only internet phenomenom I caught was the tail-end of Homestar Runner and a tiny slice of Runescape. And AOL Instant Messenger, but since that was just with my homeschool friends (and eventually maybe a couple high school friends) it doesn’t really count much. It’s not like I ever got messaged by random people or anyone I hadn’t already met in-person. Back in the day, though, I didn’t even know I was missing anything. Flash games, early social media, forums, all of that happened without me catching anything until Line Rider showed up (which was very popular in my high school since we had touchscreen chalkboards (I forget exactly what they were called) that meant we could draw with pens on the giant screens and every one of us was leaping at the chance to do that every time we could. It was strange, to get to high school and realize just how much I’d been missing and how much I still was because I didn’t know to ask and, for three of my four years, was the quiet kid who didn’t misbehave or toe the line ever, so I never got brought in on stuff since everyone was worried I’d snitch (I, unfortunately, was at a local restaurant at the same time as some older students who got busted for whatever they’d been talking about and everyone assumed it was me who told on them instead of, you know, the restaurant’s owner who hated all the teens who came into his store and routinely got kids in trouble with the school for misbehaving there).

With most pop culture, you can catch up. You can learn enough to understand the jokes, eventually get the context for the references, maybe even come to understand the hyperspecific memes, but a lot of stuff on the internet wound up not being as permanent as we were always warned it was and has vanished since then. Classic movies and TV shows you can expect to be around for a while. Everyone assumed the internet would be forever. Now… Well, there’s so much that has been lost over the years, assigned to the garbage bin of history because someone stopped paying for hosting or individual websites were strangled out of existence thanks to Facebook lying about the pivot to video, or it was in some company’s financial interests to removed something they’d acquired from the general public only to learn no one would pay for whatever it was they’d acquired and eventually took it down entirely because it just wasn’t worth the maintenance costs. So much of internet pop-culture was only seen by the people who were there to witness it in the moment of its ultimately ephemeral existence.

I don’t know that my life would have been with that kind of broader exposure to the internet. I was kind of dealing with a lot back then and I’m not sure the internet would have helped me any. It might have made life more difficult, especially if I’d ever opened up to people about what I was dealing with. Denial and avoidance were my main coping mechanisms back then and anything that might have broken me out of those would have forced me to confront how horrible my life actually was. All before I had someplace to go that was away from my family. It would have been a disaster. But I can’t help but wonder about everything I missed and the things I might still go experience. I do want to catch up. I do want to have those familiar touchstones with other people. It’s not exactly fun being the person who always has to ask what people are talking about or who has to say that they didn’t see that movie/TV show/anime/video game/musicia/any piece of culture ever. But I doubt I’ll ever really catch up. There’s just too much stuff and it’s constantly happening now as well, even if the internet has contracted severely and largely disappeared into Facebook’s shit, Twitter, LinkedIn, and various news sites. I mean, I know that there’s still stuff out there (myself included!) but it’s so much more difficult to find these days without the hubs we used to have for similar interests. Now… Well, at least I can usually tell when something is becoming culturally relevant and when it’s just significant for a fleeting moment as seems to be the case with almost everything these days…