WELCOME. YOU’VE GOT MAIL! 

1998 – the year I finally got online, and apparently, mail!

I remember when I first had access to the World Wide Web: 1998, when my dad first signed us up onto America Online. I was either 7 or 8 years old at the time and, understandably, I was a very impressionable child.

It was an interesting concept: being able to contact people from all over the world at the push of many buttons, from the AOL chat rooms to bulletin boards. It didn’t take long for me to visit all of the various websites and resources kids could access online, from Nickelodeon websites to Cartoon Network, and anything in-between. This is also around the time I started looking at websites of my favorite hobbies, which at the time were video games, WWF (now WWE), and Pokémon.

Although I am not sure exactly how it started, I somehow got into the mode of recruiting people to my Pokémon fan club. It had various sections named after Pokémon and would have interesting tidbits and factoids about each of the Pokémon, as well as episode recaps. I would go on message boards and chat rooms asking if people wanted to join my fan club and receive a daily newsletter (since new episodes came out every day) and grow a community of die-hard Pokémon fans. We would even discussed the then-popular Pokémon trading card game (TCG) and oogle over who had what cards. Imagine, pieces of foil+cardboard with cute art that had intrinsic value just because people said it did. What a concept. However, I think the Pokémon project lasted about 2 months, and I am pretty sure I got bored and moved on to another project: a short-lived fan club and e-mail newsletter program that revolved around the then-WWF. After committing the TV show schedules to memory, I would finish my homework early and watch the episodes intensely. While watching, I would write out a recap of what was going on during the match, who won and who lost, and how that would shape up a championship run or whatever storyline was going at the time. Yes, I know it’s all scripted, but like I said, I was very impressionable. For a kid between 8-10 years old, I would say that’s pretty impressive. Imagine if YouTube had been around at that time…

When I think about times like that in my life, I wonder if I was just doing it for fun, or because I wanted to create something that was mine. I was never the type of student to just focus on studying in school. It was always “school and”.  I always had an extra-curricular activity, whether school-sanctioned, parent-sanction, or personal projects. I continued that trend in high school by joining sports and doing on-campus work and volunteering and well into college where I worked, had at one time joined ROTC, and eventually launched my photography business.  While my under-10 year old showed flashes of entrepreneurship, or at least, the ability to create something from scratch on the newly-adopted digital landscape back in 1998, it amuses me to think what would have happened had that been fostered throughout my childhood and teen years or, perhaps, if I was that curious 7 or 8 year old kid making that kind of content when YouTube and the FB era started to gain a lot of traction between 2005-2006.

By the way, in the 1990s we loved getting e-mail because it was so new and so cool. Nowadays, acquiring subscribers for your e-mail newsletter relies on data, numbers, and delivering useful content before giving the ask.

How times have changed.