It is the early 2000s, and I am, of course, watching PBS Kids. Fetch with Ruff Ruffman is on and showing how some D/deaf people have video phones in their homes and in the homes of their close family and friends. It is perhaps the coolest thing I have ever seen. The future, Ruff Ruffman tells me, might bring this to my home, which is the coolest thing I could ever conceptualize. I would call my grandparents a state away, and my cousins nearby them.
In 1998, Google and I come into the world, side by side it seems. The internet grows with me, and I grow with it. I am an inquisitive toddler driving my mom insane with questions no one could ever answer. She says, with patience, "I don't know, let's Ask Jeeves..." This is one of my earliest memories, tied explicitly to the internet of yore, a website I don't actually remember, but remember others remembering.
Very early into the new millennia, I play Jumpstart on the family computer after having dug it out of a bin at Fry's Electronics with my dad, where he also bought a car phone. On our way home we call my mom, "I'm calling you from the car!" my dad is jittering with excitement. We go to Fry's quite a bit, always something new to play with on a computer as thick as my adult-size forearm is long.
A few years later, My brother and I download webgames (and viruses...) from Yahoo Games onto my grandma's computer when she watches us while our parents work, which my dad constantly has to fix (sorry Nana...). My dad, one of the last holdouts I know to adopting a cell phone, eventually gets an orange flip phone from Cingular, my mom at that point on her second phone, a pink Razor. I play with her old gray cellphone and occasionally chew on the rubber-coated antenna in between games of snake (I don't fear microplastics because my body is actually full of macroplastics).
My childhood best friend, S.'s, older brother gets an iPod Touch, we cannot contain our excitement about it while we play with my pocket electronic dictionary at recess. We are quite adept at the anagrams game, outpacing anyone who tries to play us, probably from our summer Boggle games.
It is the early 2010s, S. and I play the Sims on our respective family computers during sleepovers, and it is quite possibly the most fun I have ever had. I learn to code to build mods and custom content and add what others have built into my game.
We delight in Youtube with my older brother and secretly start our own channels (forbade by our parents). We use Omegle and Chat Roulette, a defining moment of most cusp Gen Z children's lives. The blue chaotic glow of the family computer on all night. We delight in the websites it seems people create just for the fun of creating things, found by my older brother or our computer teacher to show us (Paula Deen riding things dot com my beloved). We stumble upon the horrors of mankind and the creative kindnesses juxtaposed.
The night her mom dies, S. and I stay up all night instant messaging on Facebook (which we have had for nearly a year, though we are still below the technical allowable age) through our iPod Touches. I teach her the short cut for the shark emoji. It feels like all I know how to do.
Nearly two years later, my middle school friends and I film a music video to edit in iMovie for a class project and wonder if it will go viral enough for us to get on Ellen (thankfully it does not).
It is the early 2010s still, but I am alone. I google "am i gay quiz", "am i gay quiz for girls", "how do i know if i'm gay girls","kinsey scale", "is it wrong to be gay", "how do i stop being gay girls", "republican who supports gay marriage", "is it okay to be a democrat if your parents are republicans?", "is it okay to not be either democrat or republican?", "what does it mean to be prochoice?", "how to act straight girls", "will i go to hell for being gay", "the trevor project", "trevorchat", "it gets better project", "does it actually get better or do people just say that"
It is the mid 2010s, an era which feels like it lasted forever and only a second. I am a teenage girl on tumblr, perhaps the most wretched thing men of the time can imagine. Though I am perhaps the least qualified person maybe in the entire world to do so, I run an advice blog for queer teens on the side of my personal blog (where I mostly reblog absurdist humor textposts). I reach out to other queer people just barely not in high school on my main blog and beg them to tell me it gets better, they do, but I mostly don't believe them. On my side blog, fellow teens ask me how to ask out crushes, how to navigate coming out, how to know if they are gay. I answer as best I can.
On tumblr, I see the spectrum of human depravity, desperation, devastation, humor, creativity, and mobilization. My youth culture lives online. Somehow, a decade later, new friends and I will know snapshots of each other's adolescence from this. The way kids all somehow sing the same jump-rope songs, despite never meeting each other, is the same way we reference text posts, context long forgotten. Nice shoelaces.
Online, as I have been for my entire life, as have most of my peers on tumblr, I know this digital civilization won't last forever, not like this, anyway. I've watched others collapse into ruin throughout my life enough to not have delusions of permanence. Our vent posts written under a read more feel more like the uncovered graffiti left in Pompeii. We are archiving this moment in time, and maybe someone, one day will see it and know we were here. For now, though, in the thick of the abyss, we witness for each other: I am here, I am like you, I am afraid, I am alone, I don't know what to do about it. Leelah Alcorn kills herself and I read her queued suicide note. None of us mistake the abyss of the internet for a friend, but many of us gladly witness each others' flare guns. I'm here, too, like you, afraid, but witnessing.
My classmates and I use Facebook messenger, now a separate app, since not everyone has a phone or privacy via text. I come out to my friends from Latin class in a group chat there and beg them to keep the secret. They shower me in support and agree. I go on the chat based Trevor lifeline (TrevorChat) several times a week. The closet door is so heavy on my chest, but a fear of possibility equally rests its heel on my throat. Someone breaks the script one week as I collapse in (typed) sobbing heaps over my fears of my parents un-loving me to tell me about his partner, his two dogs, his life as a gay adult, to tell me it is possible. I write his name down in my notebook and hold on to the hope it is possible for me, too. I will live, if for no other reason, than that I know Tony, his partner, and his two dogs did it first.
I watch RuPaul's Drag Race for free on LogoTV dot com. This is some of the only 'real' gay representation I can get. I will live because they are alive. I will live because they are proof I can. Okay, they are not the world's best role models, but they are alive. So am I. I am here, too, afraid, and witnessing.
I watch Dan Savage advice videos. I watch an animated typography set over the live audio of Harvey Milk's "Hope" speech. I know that I am the small voice on the phone saying thanks. I have to stay, and fight.
I read a GLSEN school climate survey available for free online and skip to the conclusion section, which reads that queer youth are happier out of the closet. Desperate to be any happier, I come out. Though it is difficult and I lose friends and acquaintances at school, new bullying taking shape, I am actually happier if for no other reason than the relief of not lying by omission. Each year after this that I am still in high school, I fill out the same survey that opened the door for me. Even if I have to fake it, I proclaim that I am here, and they are, too, so they have no choice but to witness it.
I am in college, my freshman year, my friends from across the hall are also on tumblr, my friends from high school on Instagram (which I finally downloaded a few months earlier, one of the last holdouts amongst my social group), all of us on Snapchat. I FaceTime my best friend from high school from a state away, the future Ruff Ruffman told me of, which seemed hardly possible just over 10 years ago, is now exceeded. The video call is not just in my home (or more accurately, dorm room) but wherever I want.
There are ten years (approximately) that pass by in a blur I can scarcely remember between that moment and the one I write this in. It is the mid 2020s. I remember my home phone number from 2007, but not my older brother's new cellphone number from two years ago. I have only ever actually dialed it once, to add it to my contacts, and thereafter have just typed his name to get to it.
iPod Touches are vintage tech somehow. The Sims hasn't lived on any of my last two machines, and I have played it only once or twice in the blurry ten years between. I hated Sims 4, released around my freshman year of undergrad, it lacked the roughness and lore of the first 3 games. The internet now does, too. Somehow, it almost feels like offline life might as well. People hardly create just to create; but, to sell, people create profusely.
I know what most people online have eaten in a day, I know things about strangers that I don't even know if I know about myself. I watch them use the notoriety of humiliation to make bank. The internet isn't an abyss to fire a flare gun into anymore, nor a soon crumbling, ancient society with bricks we scratch our names into so as to not be forgotten. It is a quickly growing brush fire engulfing and surrounding the city. Mount Vesuvius has not only exploded, covering and encapsulating the internet that raised me in thick ashes, but, the journal factory has exploded, too, leaving us scavenging in the wasteland. I live in the wreckage so much that that, in and of itself, was a reference to the internet of recent.
I research social media (and here is a shameless plug to my figshare and ORCiD to prove it) among other things, and this, in junction with my work as a librarian and my life, nearly bourne digital, means I know the internet is integral to information access.
I know information access is necessarily tied to justice, to equity, to literacy, in a cyclical loop. A just world is equitable is literate is free to access information, backwards, forwards, in infinity. The family computer, where so much of my learning (for better and worse) took place, has broken out of my childhood kitchen and is in my pocket, and personal. Likely, almost certainly, yours is, too. Why, then, is literacy in all dimensions so low, and loneliness, disillusionment, disconnection so high?
A just world is free to access information. A just world knows how to parse it, and who to go to if they cannot, who they can trust to parse it in their stead if the literacy is out of their scope. Importantly, they also know their scope, what is within it, and what is outside of it. A just world knows the harms that can be caused when scope be damned, disregarded, confused, blurred-- I spend a lot of time, obviously, as a librarian, on literacy: what it is, how to build it, how to understand it--but, as a librarian, what matters more to me than literacy is its absence.
It is 2026, I know that the person I am is tied tightly to the internet that raised me. My life was saved by it, quite literally. I accessed information in starving mouthfuls, I let it all happen to me, the horrific terror of mankind, stumbling upon it left logged into display computers at Best Buy, reblogged or improperly tagged on tumblr, gleefully shown to me by strangers on random chat sites; and, the beauty, the creativity, the silliness, the possibility when someone broke through the digital mask to show me that I, too, may one day live long enough to look back, when someone said I'm here, too, if only just to witness; I'm here, too, if only to prove I was.
I craved the community I didn’t have access to. I craved adults who could understand and accept me, I craved friends, I craved unconditional family, or the feeling of it. In my beta version Gen Z head, the best I had was LogoTV dot com, tumblr, defunct and barely remembered forums.
I read poetry, I read studies, I read exposé en masse, I watched brainrot reality TV that showed me that people like me could be silly, joyful adults, I watched YouTube videos that dared me to stay alive long enough to find out whether or not they were lying. I learned about rhetoric by doing it. I learned about social issues by seeing them. I laughed at things I could not explain to my parents. Neural pathways worked grooves in my brain full of references I don't remember the origins of. All of it, swirling around me, and I leapt from it, out of a situation of youthful crises to be an informed and literate adult that I would not have been in its lack.
It's 2026, the internet that raised me, and maybe you, has passed. Somewhere, long ago, a misfolded prion in its code, such that before us now: a frothing mouthed dog.
What is a legacy with rabies?
What is it to be grateful for something that may have always been waiting to snarl and spit at you in hopes you would, in turn, further the virus upon another?
LogoTV is something else now, and I would have to pay Paramount to access the shows that saved me as a 12, 13, 14, 15 year old legally; moreover, at any time, they could take them entirely behind a dark wall. Fry's closed during the Pandemic lockdown, I've outlasted Net Neutrality, I've outlasted Google's mandate that employees "[not] be evil". I've watched the cancellation of just about everyone from RPDR, and then watched a few get un-cancelled. There, but for fortune go I. There but for knowing what it used to look like here, but for the glimpses of what could grow in the wake, but for wanting a just world, but for witnessing it all.
It's 2026, I argue that I want my students to be literate, to learn to tolerate the distress of the process it takes to get there, to tolerate the distress of the not knowing, to learn to tolerate the distress of nuance, which so much of authentic witnessing hinges upon. Here I am, defending the virtue of toil, like some kind of self flagellating monk, but to phrase it less theoretically (I mean who am I, Malthus?):
What do any of these disparate parts have to do with each other?
We can understand information writ large, access to it, and to the comprehension of it (which is literacy) as a determinate of health; and the internet as an environment, and thus susceptible to pollution and lack of safety like any other environment. Environment, also, is an important determinate of health.
The internet as it is today, as an environment, is rife with pollution from mis- and disinformation. It is an information desert, wherein information is only accessible to those with a means to travel to it and a knowledge of where to go. This is literacy and education.
When information is brought into such a polluted environment, it is often a moot point. A lack of necessary literacy often causes it to further the pollution as it is misinterpreted and cast into doubt, stratifying the desert situation further as we are cast into scrambled hierarchical groups: those who are informed and those who believe themselves to be.
The environment is not safe, vulnerable groups are predated upon and susceptible to violence and violent interference, and are unable to reliably access information, and/or not afforded the necessary literacy to parse it. Routinely denied the ability to access educational experiences that would increase their literacy skills, either intentionally, to keep them disenfranchised, or, unintentionally, because of a paternalistic belief that they cannot handle the distress required to learn these skills, or a third and insidious, pretentious unwillingness to present these opportunities and experiences where and how they might be accessible, and to those who would truly benefit, many are kept in a spiraling cycle of illiteracy.
We refuse to witness and let witness, to see information at its most human or its least human, a friend, an adversary, something to be silly, and something to be very serious. Something that can be plausibly held in our students' own two hands, within their own minds, if only they know the importance of it.
Information and information literacy reached me because they came to where I was and in a way that felt approachable. We cannot expect the same results if we are opposed to that solution.
I often see this firsthand in academia, with pressure to give students AI tools rather than placing them in the Zone of Proximal Development where they may develop literacy skills. Never mind AI contributing to literal pollution and denigration of visibly tangible social determinants of health offline; and, information pollution via proliferation of misinformation through hallucinations online. I remember an internet where I was human, and you were human, and we knew, though between us an inhuman screen, between us also, a mutual witnessing. I learned to be information literate because of this. I was saved by humanity, shown digitally, not by the digital masquerading as human.
But wait-- there's more!
A key part of information literacy is the ability to hold the nuanced nature of information. It is also an important part of being human. We are ourselves quite nuanced. This is something that is often largely missed online.
If we cannot allow, as educators, ourselves to be witnessed as nuanced-- as both silly and serious, as both flawed and competent, how can we expect that students will understand the nuance of information? The importance is the dialectic: it is so silly to be too serious, and very serious that you sometimes be witnessed being silly. It is incredibly important to stand in the truths we can prove, but know there are so many things we don't know, and that there are so many things we are still learning. We need to be willing to learn, to normalize and undo shame in things changing as we learn. We are exemplars of information literacy, so we must be exemplars of nuance, of the importance of community and compassion, and of access.
Today, 2026, I am informed, alive, and connected to my community because I was able to access the environment of the internet before it was rife with rabid disease, and polluted beyond the point of being cancerous, but even so, I was vulnerable and exposed to the violence contained therein. But I was there, if only to show I was, if only to briefly leave my name on a brick in its wake, if only to remember that others were there, too, but they didn't make it far enough to ever read this. I saw them.
We can return to the Drag Race cast and barely older tumblr teens and twenty somethings. Were they the role models my family would’ve wanted for me? It didn’t and doesn’t matter, because to me, they were living queer adults, something I had never seen in real life before. They were proof that I could live to adulthood, I could come out one day, I could have friends, I could have a group of people who would make sense and empathize with my experiences, who could share a communal niche.
D-tier gay TV, watched for free on a cracked screen, brought me comfort. There was a world where there were people like me, at least in this way. Absurdist text posts, cancellations, and unqualified advice lent me skills in compassion, nuance, silliness, and a shared vocabulary. Instant messaging, forums, chat rooms, the world that grew with me, my formative experiences wretched, terrifying, thrilling, comforting, mundane; there are sections of the internet that feel akin to walking through my old neighborhood. I remember what used to be in that building.
I am writing here in support in of the future Ruff Ruffman promised me, and because I want the family computer to be placed back inside the home, out of my pocket, which may be the only way to stop the raging wildfire of illiteracy and disconnection without sacrificing information and community access and mobilization. I'm writing to advocate for literacy for all so that there may be equity and justice, and I am writing because I lived long enough to do so, long enough that plausibly somewhere someone like who I was when I was much younger might read this and see it as proof. Yes, I lived, and so can you... And, I'm here, because, I suppose, because I benefited from the internet of yore where sometimes things were created just to create, just to show someone could, so in part this, too, was written just for the sake of writing it.