Looking back, it seems like a different world.
I was in HS from 2009-2013. In middle school everyone was on MySpace, but smartphones were not as advanced and many people didn’t have one, so everyone mainly used PCs which basically filtered most NPCs and retards from getting on the internet. If you were on MySpace, you were basically forced to learn basic HTML so that you could have the coolest MySpace page and mog everyone else’s. MySpace gave indie artists and musicians a platform, making it a goldmine of good media (if you knew where to look.) Scene subculture was propagated thru MySpace—it combined elementals of emo/metalhead culture with white/trendy/pop culture, resulting in acts like Jeffree Starr who at the time was singing about cutting, glitter, blood and cum. (My gay friend would talk with him often on MS.) You could curate your “top 4” or “top 8/12/16” friends, which allowed you to literally publicly “rank” your friends which made for…. an interesting social dynamic. FB was unknown/new.
In HS the black and Hispanic kids would form their own crews and chill in the hallways in b/w classes, they were only loud among themselves. The Azn kids were usually nerds and hung out with each other. White kids weren’t villain-ized yet so they sort of hung out with everyone, they were usually divided into the jocks, rednecks, stoners/ICP fags, emos, skaters etc. PC culture didn’t exist, so ppl would tease and talk shit to each other but it wasn’t a screech fest and any real beefs usually resulted in fights in the neighborhood across the street or the halls.
We weren’t on our phones nearly as much as now, ppl still talked w/ each other face2face and would meet up at the mall, football games, or at the movies etc. The most used electronics were MP3 players or handheld video game devices. Social media wasn’t pervasive yet, so everyone was more social, your secrets were safe and ppl actually had unique personalities etc. Good times
