Post 9: Xanga Reminiscence

At the beginning of my sophomore year I one day noticed my friend on a web page I had never seen before. When I asked her about it she quickly introduced me to the world of blogging. The sight was Xanga, and within about a 2 month period about 7 of my real close friends had developed sights of their own. It was like nothing we had ever experienced. We were free, free to express our emotions and to communicate with each other at all times of the day without tying up our home phones (none of us at this point had cell phones). We blogged about our love lives, friendships, disappointments, exciting events, family, pets… the list went on and on. It was the period during which our friendships were the closest. It was easy to comment suggestions and celebrations on other’s pages, and it was easy to express your emotions when you knew that somewhere one of your friends was going to log on and share them with you. Maybe it was our adolescence, or maybe it was simply the thought that something in our lives was simple, but blogging became the center of our world. As we got older, however, our posts became less frequent and our friendships began to unwind themselves. By the time the end of my senior year Xanga was just a place we visited for a melancholic reminiscence or for a laugh about the things we toiled over in our earlier youth. This experience makes me wonder about all the things we were infatuated with in our youth that diminished in value in our life as we age.