Top sci-fi movies and TV shows to watch on Amazon Prime in December

Coming Of Age At The Dawn Of The Social Internet

Like so many millennials, I entered the online world through AOL Instant Messenger. I created an account one unremarkable day in the late nineteen-nineties, sitting in the basement of my childhood home at our chunky white desktop computer, which connected to the Internet via a patchy dial-up modem. I picked a username, "Silk," based on a character from my favorite series of fantasy novels, with asterisks and squiggles tacked on to differentiate my account from others who'd chosen to be Silks as well. The character in the books was a charismatic thief with a confidence that I, an awkward middle schooler, could only aspire to at the time. But the name was not intended as a cloak of anonymity, because most of the people I corresponded with on AIM were school friends whom I saw every day. Each evening, during my parentally allotted hour of screen time, I'd keep several different chats going simultaneously in separate windows, toggling between them when one person or another went AFK—"away from keyboard." This was unavoidable in the age of dial-up, when the Internet connection would get disrupted any time a parent had to use the phone line. Being online wasn't yet a default state of existence. You were either present on AIM, immersed in real time, or you weren't.

There were strangers online, too, and kids venturing into AOL chat rooms could easily find themselves creeped on or misled. It would still be a few years before members of the boomer generation became fully aware of the risks of letting their children loose on the Internet. But for the moment, among my tween cohort, AOL Instant Messenger felt like a kind of alternative society to the one we inhabited in the physical world. Away messages, the brief customized notes that popped up when a user was idle, became a potent mode of self-expression. Quoting song lyrics was big—Blink-182's "All the Small Things" seemed like the pinnacle of sophistication—but it was considered a faux pas to copy lyrics that a friend had already chosen. Spotting a copycat, one might make use of another classic AIM move, the passive-aggressive away-message update. "Are you going to be on AIM later?" was a common refrain at school. It meant something like "see you later"—on the Internet, where we were still ourselves but with a heady new sense of freedom.

My second home on the Internet was LiveJournal, an early online publishing platform. Rather than gossiping and dropping hints to one another in abstruse away messages, my friends and I wrote diary entries. Posts on L.J., as we called it, were visible to multiple people at once, so my writing there became a kind of public performance, a way of appearing more self-aware and eloquent than I was in person. Every evening, I trawled friends' pages to see if they had posted and hoped that others were scoping mine in turn. One night, I stumbled upon the LiveJournal of a friend whom I hadn't known kept an account on the site, and was mortified to discover that his most recent post criticized me by name. I had evidently complained about not being invited to a party, which the friend considered to be evidence of my jealous tendencies. I closed the Web browser before I could read any more, feeling foolish for not realizing that the kind of scrutiny I aimed outward in my online writings could be just as easily targeted at me.

A slightly older high-school friend named Parker, a budding graphic designer, had built a Web site for herself that included a section for blogging. L.J. Allowed us to write about ourselves for an audience, but the nascent world of blogs seemed like something different—an adult pursuit, for those who presumably had something worth saying. (Little did we know. . . .) My friend's site was personalized and elegant, with intricate HTML page structures and clickable art that she'd made herself in Photoshop, which was then easy to pirate online. She posted thoughts on the artists and bands that she liked. Her Web site seemed like a curated museum of the self, built up gradually and carefully. I was smitten with the site, but also, of course, with her.

I pestered Parker to make me a blog, too. She eventually agreed and hosted it as a subdomain on her own URL, which in retrospect was emblematic of the power dynamic between us. The site has been dead for years, but using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine I was recently able to dredge it back up. Reading the blog (which I had aptly titled Verbal Diarrhea) was endearing and excruciating at once. I published angsty screeds about the boredom I felt growing up in the Connecticut suburbs, marooned in the woods without a driver's license. "I don't have any mystery in my personal life, so I make it up," I wrote in one post. Parker and I carried out arguments in the comment threads, just the two of us sniping back and forth, cryptically, perhaps on the off chance that someone else was reading. "You killed me in public," one comment reads, referencing some now-forgotten high-school incident. Parker and I were critical of each other's narcissism, the way we thought every sign in the world pointed back to ourselves—which was a feature of adolescence, sure, but also a habit encouraged by the Internet, which had given every one of us our own audience, actual or imagined.

I didn't understand yet in middle school, but in the years that followed I began to think of my online presence as a shadow self. Those aware of it could see it, and I could see theirs—the reflection of their avatars and icons and away messages, the tone of their instant-message chats or L.J. Posts. But, for other people who were not so online, it was still invisible, insignificant. I've been thinking a lot about this early version of my online self lately as I've been writing about latter-day digital culture and taking stock of just how much the landscape has changed. The so-called open Internet has consolidated today around a handful of platforms that serve users content according to the numbing logic of algorithmic recommendations and feeds. Passive consumption is encouraged. Every interaction is surveilled and commodified through targeted advertising.

It's easy to be nostalgic for the way things were when you were a teen-ager. I grew up online, but time inevitably moved on, and younger generations have become the prime demographic for a new wave of technology. As the writer Max Read recently posited in the Times, perhaps millennials have simply aged out of the Internet. Still, I think something more fundamental has been lost for all of us as social media has evolved. It's harder to find the spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a few giant companies have carved for us all.

Gradually, I realized that the Internet was not just a localized community of people I knew in person but a vaster civilization, with virtual cities full of other people constructing and managing their own shadow selves. Early in high school, I began playing Ragnarok Online, a Korean multiplayer role-playing video game that allowed me to commune with thousands of other users playing at the same time. The game, a predecessor to ones like World of Warcraft, turned the Internet's burgeoning interactivity into full color, motion, and sound, literalizing the idea of a "virtual world." I was hooked; there are years of my life from which I have more memories of playing Ragnarok than I do of going to school. Still sitting in the basement of my childhood home, I was now hanging out with people from all over the world. The players from Thailand often wrote "555" in the in-game chat room, which I eventually gathered was phonetic in Thai for "hahaha."

During study-hall periods at school, I headed to the library or the computer lab and covertly logged in to Ragnarok discussion forums. Any time I see a color combination of green and gold, the pixelated design of a forum called Merchant Guild still flashes in my mind. What we'd now call being "extremely online" was still a clandestine activity for nerds; there was no social capital to be gained from a facility with the customs of the Web. Talking in the forums, to players I knew only by their pseudonyms and avatars, was the first time in my life that I felt like other people were interested in my opinions. I had developed unmistakable expertise in such matters as which monsters to hunt to gain "experience" points, or why thief characters should always equip themselves with daggers. (I didn't say it was useful knowledge.) My online shadow self possessed a sense of authority and agency that I lacked elsewhere.

The Ragnarok forums sent me on my first trips down the online rabbit hole. The people I chatted with there would name-drop other sites that they frequented; exploring one led me to yet another. There was a forum about playing guitar (Ultimate Guitar) which sent me to one about the Dave Matthews Band (Ants Marching) and, soon enough, to one for disaffected Dave Matthews fans (UFCK, legendary for its cranks). Perhaps other teen-agers got the same feeling playing on a sports team, running drills or training in the gym together, experiences that I scrupulously avoided. I was inept, undisciplined, and unprepared for those collective activities—except online, where I didn't need to exist in a body.

By the time I was finishing high school, the digital world I'd grown accustomed to was starting to transform. The proliferation of home Wi-Fi was making it easier to go online. Cell phones, like the 2004 Motorola Razr, became trendy accessories and promulgated the language of text messages—like AIM chats that you could hold in your palm. Social networks as we know them today were emerging. MySpace, which launched in 2003, was the first Web site that my IRL friends introduced me to, having caught wind of it from their elder siblings. (Friendster, MySpace's predecessor, seemed to be for an older crowd.) When I made an account, I was surprised to find that MySpace tethered my shadow self to my physical person. I was no longer just a pseudonym and a cartoon avatar; the site asked for my actual name and a photo of my face; it told me to list my interests for everyone to see. Before, going online had felt like being a solo hiker, exploring unknown territories. Now I felt like I was putting out a billboard for myself on the highway.

MySpace linked the digital geography of the Internet to the offscreen world in other ways. You connected your account to your friends' accounts by "friending" them, building a map of your preëxisting IRL relationships, and the site prompted you to choose a "Top Friends" ranking of eight people whose names appeared first in the list. The feature became a source of drama—picking someone for your Top selection was no guarantee that they would pick you—but this wasn't a problem for me, since I didn't have more than eight friends in school anyway. Looking back at my long-defunct MySpace page, now populated by broken images and empty frames, I found that I had only fifteen "connections" on the site, including MySpace Tom, the site's co-founder and president, who was friends by default with everyone who joined.

Compared with the fragmented, D.I.Y. Web I knew, social media felt strangely predictable. User profiles on new sites like LinkedIn or Flickr were templated and surrounded by ads. They offered preset options from categories and drop-down menus—age, location, institutional affiliation—and quantified influence through friend and follower counts. The networks were no longer an escape from the power structures of the physical world but a way of reinforcing them. When Mark Zuckerberg started TheFacebook, as he initially called it, he allowed only Harvard students, then the rest of the Ivy League, to join. In the spring of 2006, all college students were invited, and I eagerly awaited an official e-mail address from the university I would be attending.

How To Choose Between The Ring And Blink Video Doorbell

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

One of the first pieces of smart home technology people invest in is a video doorbell. It holds a lot of promise—the ability to see who dropped by when you weren't there, and, more importantly, interact with those people as if you were there. A smart doorbell allows you to secure your packages, or watch them get stolen in high definition. It's often an easy choice to buy one, but the tougher decision is which brand to purchase.

Although it may seem like a one-off purchase, your doorbell could become part of a whole home security system in the future, and you'll want everything to be the same brand. Two of the biggest players in the field are Ring, the OG of video doorbells, and Blink, the Amazon brand. (To be clear, Amazon owns both brands now.) So, which is the better video doorbell: Ring or Blink? 

On cost alone, you can't beat Blink

Blink keeps things simple. There's only one model, the Blink Video Doorbell, and it can be hardwired or wireless. At only $59.99, it is substantially less than most Ring models on the market. Ring has taken a different approach, and has many versions of the doorbell available. The Video Doorbell (2nd Generation), the most comparable to the Blink's hardwired or wireless approach, is $99.99. A more recent release, the Battery Doorbell Plus (Video Doorbell), is considerably more expensive at $179.99. If you plan to hardwire your doorbell, you can also look at the Video Doorbell Wired for $64.99, an earlier release that can't be used wirelessly, the wired Video Doorbell Pro for $169.99, or Video Doorbell Pro 2 for $249.99. Ring also offers a Peephole Cam (Video Doorbell) for $129.99 and their top-of-the-line model, the Video Doorbell Elite, which at $349.99 comes with professional installation and is Ring Doorbells look more substantial

The Blink camera follows the look and feel of other Blink products like the security cameras—universally black and sleek with plastic and metal parts, rounded corners and a rather slim profile. It doesn't look expensive, and it's not. Ring cameras, on the other hand, look more substantial and well-designed. Featuring brushed metal parts, most are aluminum steel (silver) and black, with a front camera surrounded by a blue circle. The model you choose will determine how much brushed metal is featured, but Ring has a more established ecosystem of frames and mounts for the doorbell as well, which means you can disguise the metal if you so choose. Ring cameras usually feature a mix of sharp edges and rounded curves. 

Both doorbells come with mounting plates for a flat surface, but Blink doorbells simply slide onto the mount, while Ring doorbells are secured by a few screws to the mount, for security. 

On installation, it's a dead heat between Ring and Blink

Installation has two parts: physically mounting the doorbell, and then connecting it to your app. Both doorbells involve unboxing the doorbell, downloading an app, and then walking through a guided installation where you scan for a new device, connect the doorbell to your home's wireless, and then set it up within the app. Having set both up, I can tell you there's no advantage here for either brand. 

In five years of having a Ring mounted to my door, I've only had to do a hard reset once, and that's probably on me for letting it go uncharged for six months. In the month I had a Blink doorbell installed, it went offline every few days, and had to be hard reset at least once. The Ring has never gone offline. 

Even if you prefer rechargeable batteries, you may still prefer Blink's AAs

If you're using a hardwired connection, battery power isn't an issue. However, if you've gone wireless, it's another story. Taking the doorbell off to charge it or change the batteries is a pain in the neck. Blink, luckily, requires only a few AA batteries, and claims the batteries can last two years. By contrast, Ring wireless doorbells use either a USB charger or a removable battery, which you will normally need to recharge every few months. To use the USB charger, you need to remove the entire doorbell, plug it in, charge it and then mount it again. The rechargeable batteries require removing a faceplate and grabbing the battery to do the same, meaning the doorbell won't have a battery while it charges. You can, however, purchase additional batteries so you can always have one in the Ring while the other is charging. 

Now, normally, I think regular batteries are "over" and I'd rather have a rechargeable battery. But as a Ring owner, I think Blink may have an advantage for ease and length of battery life. At a minimum, to compare, you'd need to purchase an additional battery unit, and choose a Ring model that has a removable battery. 

All this said, Ring has an optional solar charger to extend the battery life. 

When it comes to resolution, some of the Ring models are superior

All video doorbells, including the Blink and Ring models, offer high-definition 1080p video, including night vision. This should deliver clear, crisp video at all hours. Two of the Ring models, the Video Doorbell Pro 2 and the Battery Doorbell Plus, offer higher resolution, at 1536p. These two also offer color night vision, which is an improvement over standard black and white.  Of course, those models are also two of the most expensive, but if the quality of the video you're capturing is important, you'll want to go with a higher-end Ring doorbell. 

Saving clips on the cloud and locally

It doesn't matter how good the video is if you can't review it. The doorbells, whether Ring or Blink, send notifications for different kinds of activity: someone ringing your doorbell, leaving a package, or passing by the front of the house in the zone you've tagged as being important. If you get the notification immediately, you can flip over to the live video of the doorbell to hopefully catch the action. That's not really how most video doorbells work, however. Although wired doorbells do this a bit better, most of them have a bit of lag, and by the time you get the notification that UPS is at your door, flip over to live video, and have it come up, the delivery driver is pulling away. That's not a problem if they left the package, but if that package is missing, and you see a notification someone was at the door after the UPS guy, you'd want to watch that video. Except you can't, unless you've set up storage for the clips. That's where these two doorbells are different. 

On both models, the Blink and the Ring, those clips can be stored in the cloud, and you pay monthly or yearly to do so. For Blink, it's $30 a year for one device, and for Ring it's $39 a year. (In both cases, the above fee is for storage from one device; you'd pay more for a whole house plan.) In both cases, you can also store videos locally, instead. For Blink, you set up a Sync Module, and attach a USB drive. For Ring, you'd need to purchase a Ring Alarm Pro and a micro SD card, and even then, you'd still need a Ring subscription on top of it. 

On features, Ring takes the lead

The Blink doorbell offers many of the same features as the company's security cameras, and for the purpose of interacting with someone at your door, or seeing video of what's happened on your stoop, it works just fine. If you're looking for more advanced options, Ring runs circles around Blink. It offers the option for professional monitoring, and has a whole community built in, so you can see alerts of what's happening in your neighborhood. Ring is compatible with IFTTT and Alexa, while Blink isn't. Blink has been slow to add AI features to its security systems, but Ring already has updated doorbells with AI that can tell if it's a person or package at the door.  

Blink vs. Ring: Which will it be?

The Blink doorbell is a solid, easy-to-install doorbell that'll kick off your smart home and security system for about $50. It's basic, but that's the Amazon brand for you. Ring is the upgrade, with more features, better looks, higher resolution and with it, more cost.

Looking for a new smart doorbell? Take your pick from our recommendations:

Blink Roadside Assistance Reviews

ConsumerAffairs is not a government agency. Companies displayed may pay us to be Authorized or when you click a link, call a number or fill a form on our site. Our content is intended to be used for general information purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment based on your own personal circumstances and consult with your own investment, financial, tax and legal advisers.

Company NMLS Consumer Access #2110672 MORTGAGE BROKER ONLY, NOT A MORTGAGE LENDER OR MORTGAGE CORRESPONDENT LENDER

NOTICE TO VERMONT CONSUMERS:THIS IS A LOAN SOLICITATION ONLY. CONSUMERS UNIFIED, LLC IS NOT A LENDER. INFORMATION RECEIVED WILL BE SHARED WITH ONE OR MORE THIRD PARTIES IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR LOAN INQUIRY. THE LENDER MAY NOT BE SUBJECT TO ALL VERMONT LENDING LAWS. THE LENDER MAY BE SUBJECT TO FEDERAL LENDING LAWS.

Home Warranty disclosure for New Jersey Residents: The product being offered is a service contract and is separate and distinct from any product or service warranty which may be provided by the home builder or manufacturer.

Consumers Unified, LLC does not take loan or mortgage applications or make credit decisions. Rather, we display rates from lenders that are licensed or otherwise authorized to work in Vermont. We forward your information to a lender you wish to contact so that they may contact you directly.

Copyright © 2024 Consumers Unified, LLC DBA ConsumerAffairs. All Rights Reserved. The contents of this site may not be republished, reprinted, rewritten or recirculated without written permission.

---