Add me, my username is Spuca_10@hotmail.com

The first form of social media I ever signed up for was MSN messenger. It was the year 2004 and I was in fourth grade. Many of us would go around writing our lame usernames on pieces of papers, asking one another to add each other on their MSN Messengers. My very pathetic username was spuca_10@hotmail.com, which, believe or not, I thought was extremely cool at the time. I was a young 10 year old boy trying to fit into elementary school wanting nothing more but to be considered one of the cool kids. Don’t get me wrong, I was never bullied or treated badly during my elementary school years, I just really wanted to be cool. I know that last sentence made you LOL but I truly believed that joining this very first form of social media was a way of communicating with my friends and furthermore, when the popular kids in school added me, as sad as it may sound, it made me feel the slightest bit more special. Looking back at certain aspects of the platform, everyone often used MSN to compete against one another such as whoever had the coolest username was considered cool. If you had a lyric from the trendiest song incorporated into your username you were considered all the more in tune with culture at the time. I like to consider MSN days as the days where I began developing a loss of patience for friends who take too long to reply. I was that msn user that constantly sent nudges to friends who wouldn’t reply within minutes but would still be online, or I would constantly sign in and out in hopes that my crush would say hi to me along with many other weird habits that I developed through MSN. To this day I constantly come across tweets and memes that relate back to the MSN days that make me feel both nostalgic and embarrassed such as memes that reference the use of customized emoticons and more.

At the time that MSN began, it was extremely hard for anyone to have foreseen that social media would have become the industry that it is today. If I can go back and tell myself one thing before I entered the world of social media, I would encourage myself to lower my expectations of what the platforms have to offer, and to not get too involved with it. Of course telling a 10 year-old to refrain from an activity that all their friends are taking part in is practically impossible. However, if I were able to speak to a more rationale, mature version of myself at the time that I joined MSN, I would tell myself to simply not obey by the unwritten rules of MSN messenger and the rest of social media. That if you don’t have a cool status or lyric in your messenger or don’t have the latest, trendiest emoticons, it’s not the end of the world. I constantly think back to the days of MSN and MySpace and worry that it caused 10 year-old Luca to have low self-esteem and insecurity problems. Of course it’s not social media’s fault, it’s simply the way my mind functions, but social media platforms definitely played a role in encouraging whatever negative anxieties I already had at the time. I would also encourage a younger version of me that there is way more to life than reliance of digital communication. When used properly, social media can be amazing and can bring joy to one’s overall life, and looking back at my pre-pubescent self, I would have encouraged that positivity and mindset. However, we must all overcome challenges in life and I believe that social media allowed me to fight my demons and anxieties and having been on MSN Messenger all the way to Vine, these platforms allowed me to practice self-awareness and develop a sense of confidence, another thing I would also proudly remind myself as I began exploring the world of social media.