The other day I was talking to someone and he mentioned to me that we are one of the the last generation of people who remember growing up without the internet. Once I got over my initial flashes about the end of the world, I kind of started feeling nostalgic and old. The point is that this is kind of true, isn't it? I remember growing up without the internet, but just barely. I think we got internet in our house when I was in the 7th grade, which makes me around 12. I didn't even know what it was or what it did. I think I only started using it properly (and from properly I mean using it to send ridiculous chain forwards, to download MSN messenger to chat with friends that I met in school every day and to use Napster, where it took me about five hours to download a single song) when I became fourteen.
I'm so glad I didn't have a blog, facebook or something equivalent when I was fourteen because there is nothing more embarrassing in the world than thinking about yourself at that age. If that wasn't enough, looking at pictures and your 'meaningful' thoughts displayed all over the internet will probably be quite mortifying later on in life. My friend's little sister has a facebook page where she keeps going on and on about her love for Nirvana, AC-DC and The Jonas' Brothers. This poor girl is going to die of shame when she's older.
Right now, I don't even know what to say about my dependence on the internet. The only thing I can say is that it is quite deep to the extent that I'm not sure if I could even live with a dial-up connection. Remember how much time you have spent waiting for the dial-up modems to connect to the internet? It wasn't just waiting for your internet to connect, even going from one website to another used to take at least 5 to 10 minutes. Every thing is much easier now, I suppose. Although, if we didn't have the internet, I'd have a lot more free time to do the things I've always meant to do but never quite got around to doing. I'd also not know a whole load of things about the world and live in my blissful bubble of ignorance.
Come to think of it, there are so many things that we take for granted now that we didn't have less than a decade ago ago, like mobile phones, ipods, dvd players, wireless, broadband, etc. We have adapted to these things pretty quickly and now find it difficult to even think of surviving without them. It hard to imagine that less than 6 years ago, I used to have boxes full of home made mixed CDs that carried not more than 20 songs each. Mixed CDs felt like such a digital revolution, as did owning a portable CD player (a 'diskman' as we used to called it) at that time. Plus, my CD player didn't have a shock absorbing mechanism, so even when there was a small movement, it used to literally fall apart and stop. It wasn't very portable at all actually.
New things will keep on turning up as it has always been happening from the start of human civilization. There is a whole group of people who grew up without television, moving further back into time, there was a whole group of people who grew up without things that I can't even perceive being without. I've always been quite open to technological change. I don't like people who don't want to learn how things work. I don't understand how they can just life their lives without the desire to learn something new. It goes against fundamental human nature! If I see something new, I get pretty excited and want to mess with it until I know everything there is to know about it, regardless of whether its going to be useful to me or not.
Its like using predictive text while sending messages on your mobile. It is a ridiculously simple mechanism if you bother finding out how it works. Yet, most non-teenagers I know are unable to use it, and send messages typing every single letter of the alphabet. It is so easy if you only put in a couple of minutes of effort in understanding how it works, and even if you don't send text messges regularly it slashes your message typing time by half. Its okay to not know things, no one is born knowing everything, but its extremely silly to not want to know how things work.
I'm so glad I didn't have a blog, facebook or something equivalent when I was fourteen because there is nothing more embarrassing in the world than thinking about yourself at that age. If that wasn't enough, looking at pictures and your 'meaningful' thoughts displayed all over the internet will probably be quite mortifying later on in life. My friend's little sister has a facebook page where she keeps going on and on about her love for Nirvana, AC-DC and The Jonas' Brothers. This poor girl is going to die of shame when she's older.
Right now, I don't even know what to say about my dependence on the internet. The only thing I can say is that it is quite deep to the extent that I'm not sure if I could even live with a dial-up connection. Remember how much time you have spent waiting for the dial-up modems to connect to the internet? It wasn't just waiting for your internet to connect, even going from one website to another used to take at least 5 to 10 minutes. Every thing is much easier now, I suppose. Although, if we didn't have the internet, I'd have a lot more free time to do the things I've always meant to do but never quite got around to doing. I'd also not know a whole load of things about the world and live in my blissful bubble of ignorance.
Come to think of it, there are so many things that we take for granted now that we didn't have less than a decade ago ago, like mobile phones, ipods, dvd players, wireless, broadband, etc. We have adapted to these things pretty quickly and now find it difficult to even think of surviving without them. It hard to imagine that less than 6 years ago, I used to have boxes full of home made mixed CDs that carried not more than 20 songs each. Mixed CDs felt like such a digital revolution, as did owning a portable CD player (a 'diskman' as we used to called it) at that time. Plus, my CD player didn't have a shock absorbing mechanism, so even when there was a small movement, it used to literally fall apart and stop. It wasn't very portable at all actually.
New things will keep on turning up as it has always been happening from the start of human civilization. There is a whole group of people who grew up without television, moving further back into time, there was a whole group of people who grew up without things that I can't even perceive being without. I've always been quite open to technological change. I don't like people who don't want to learn how things work. I don't understand how they can just life their lives without the desire to learn something new. It goes against fundamental human nature! If I see something new, I get pretty excited and want to mess with it until I know everything there is to know about it, regardless of whether its going to be useful to me or not.
Its like using predictive text while sending messages on your mobile. It is a ridiculously simple mechanism if you bother finding out how it works. Yet, most non-teenagers I know are unable to use it, and send messages typing every single letter of the alphabet. It is so easy if you only put in a couple of minutes of effort in understanding how it works, and even if you don't send text messges regularly it slashes your message typing time by half. Its okay to not know things, no one is born knowing everything, but its extremely silly to not want to know how things work.
3 comments:
We didn't get the internet until I was about to leave home for university, so I was 18 and fairly underwhelmed by dial up. But once I got to uni I was connected with a ridiculously fast line and it was one of the many new things I 'experienced' after moving away from home - and I don't think I've been disconnected since.
Kinda sad really!
I will say that on the very rare occasions when I don't go online for a day or too, I get a feeling where I don't really want to check all my e-mail, blogs, facebook etc. - it almost seems like that's the point when I should go cold turkey and 'quit'! Except I'd have to disappear off the face of the planet to do that.
When we first got internet, I remember going through things to look for websites to visit, as in, random advertising with the website written at the bottom. I don't think I'd quite grasped the concept of 'surfing'.
Also, my first computer had 4MB (that's right, MEGABYTES) of hard drive memory. Or maybe it was RAM. At any rate, 4 MB - that's the size of an mp3...
Ash: I have this terrible habit of checking all my emails and facebook regularly and not replying to messages for ages and ages for no reason at all. Sometimes I feel that I shouldn't be checking them at all but I just can't help myself.
I think once you get used to something, like fast internet or cable television (which I thankfully no longer have) is really hard to tear yourself away from it.
E: It took me ages to figure out what internet surfing was. I always thought that you could go on the internet only to specifically look for something you wanted information about but then broadband changed everything :(
Its v. creepy that you remember the hard drive memory of your first computer. I don't even know what the memory of my present laptop is and when people keep asking me about it, I keep telling them that its enough to store three seasons of Arrested Development and a lot more movies without running out.
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