EDIT:
This is probably the most substantial thing I've ever written about my life. If you know me well enough to check out my blog every now and then, then please take the time to read this post (you don't have to do it all at once silly!)
I realize this is a long post, so if you don't plan on reading the whole thing please at least read the larger type at the bottom. It's an experience I hold at heart, and one that I've always had, but never known how to explain it until now.------------------------------
While discussing the topic with OP and reading this Wired article he suggested to me, I've decided to make some comments on our generation, and how goddamn awesome we are.
Basically, yesterday, OP and I were in my car talking about how we were the first generation to understand the internet- as early in life as possible. (by that I mean, we were the first generation of kids to use the internet, and we did it at an age that was young enough to be young, but old enough to enable us to understand what we were doing, and learn from it. we were as young as you could possibly be to use the internet effectively, and it had JUST came out.)
See, now-a-days you hear parents bragging, "My kid is only 4-years-old and knows how to use the computer better than I do!"
Well, you're a fucking idiot if that's the case.
Your kid was not the first to stumble across the internet, they're simply doing what has been made natural for them.
M first vivid memories of the internet could be summed up with two experiences. Noting that the internet was available to the public only as of 1994/1995.
In 8th grade I can remember asking my good buddy Kevin D. how the hell America Online worked. See, my parents saw no use in buying an ISP (or what one was), hell, they still don't. Yet for some reason Kevin was lucky enough that his parents saw the potential. So he had to explain to me (a few times) what AOL was, what a web site was, what a browser was, and what the internet was.
I don't think I really understood it all until much later on, but I did at least grasp the concept.
The second vivid memory was trying to play Warcraft with Tristan over dial-up (TCP-IP), which involved a lot of me screaming throughout the house, "DON'T ANSWER THE PHONE!" every time it rang...8 times a night.
We are now in my 9th grade year, and I had just met Tristan in my Earth Science class. Upon discovering that we both owned (no, not p0wn3d) the game Warcraft, I almost wet my pants thinking about how cool it would be to play against each other from our bedrooms!
Unfortunetly, it took literally a WEEK to figure out how to dial each other up with the game. Worse yet, the majority of that week was Carrier's tech support (where my dad works) trying to figure it out for us. All because it was SO new, no one really knew how the fuck to get it to work.
Alright, back to where I was at the top. You know how I was saying we were the first generation of kids to really be able to use the internet. Well how does that make us special? In my mind, and I guess I only speak for myself, it was one of the best things to ever happen to me. NO other kid will ever know what I went through, EXCEPT for our generation.
Not only was the internet new (now it's been dumbed down so any jackass with half a brain (or one equivilant to a 4-year-old's) can figure it out), it was made for geeks. When I started it was TEXT based. There was no such thing as a SEARCH ENGINE (unless you were lucky enough to have someone tell you what Yahoo! was). It was fucking BORING, there was hardly any good content for anyone our age. And foremost, it was HARD TO USE.
If we wanted to make websites we had to learn HTML. If we wanted to make online journals, and we did, there was no fucking LiveJournal or Blogger.com. We had to sit down for hours screaming at how little sense tables made.
Now it's all automated through other websites.
We got excited over e-mail. It was a new secret way to pass notes to friends. I never mailed letters to my friends then, that would have been retarded. I either made notes with secret codes, or called them. E-mail was like both of those! It was instant, and confidential.
Then AOL Instant Messenger surfaced. HOOOO LLLLLY CRIPES was it great. Especially in college. Why walk down the halls and talk to people when you can just IM them!?! I think AIM single handedly taught most kids to type. If you wanted to hold up a decent converstaion you had to learn!
------------------------------Ok, so what was the point of just stating all that. There's always been a confusion in me, and I think I can finally put it out in words.
PART 1.I worry. I've always worried. I'm a worrier. So when I was a kid I also worried.
When I was riding the bus to school in kindergarden I saw other, bigger, kids on the bus rushing to finish homework. I specifically remember sitting with one of the oldest girls on the bus (in retrospect she was probably 15) and looking over at her math textbook. I can confidentally tell you now that it was an algebra book, but mind you I was hardly over 4 then (yup, started early), so it was EASILY the most confusing thing I had EVER seen in my life. Numbers AND letters!?! In the same line!?!
I seriously worried about school EVERY year from that day on. I DREADED the year that I would come upon whatever the fuck that girl was doing, because it looked HARD. I honestly worried about it until the end of my Sophmore year in college (the last year I had to take a math class).
Now, I know she wasn't doing calculus (which is as far as I was willing to take it), but for some reason the impact of the fear that book instilled on me made me think that no matter what I was doing in life, it couldn't be as hard as the crazy letter number math I would be forced to do in the future.
That girl will never know that she permanently scared the shit out of me for life. Even though I vividly remember her saying to me "Haha, it's not as hard as it looks, you'll understand it when you get to it."
PART 2.I realize this is taking a while to get to, but I feel that the above experience will help better relate what I'm finally trying to get to.
By now we know this:
1)Derek's generation was the first to use the internet because they were fucking hardcore
mother fuckers.
2)Derek relates fear to education, mainly math that involves letters and numbers.
Shortly after kindergarden, perhaps around 2nd grade, my fellow students and I were forced to learn the
Dewey Decimal Classification System.
(For all intensive purposes it'd be a good idea to state right now that after learning the Dewey Decimal system, I never really understood it, and was too afraid to ask to have it explained to me again. Due to that combined with being too shy to ask librarians for help, I struggled a lot in the years down the road when it came to finding books.)
The next day after that, along with my new understanding that adults were simply out to destroy the fun in our lives, I was about to be forced to write my first report. One whole half page, double spaced. Possibly the hardest task I had ever asked to do, but dammit, I did it. And it was about a fuzzy caterpillar I had found a couple days before. The kind that are brown and black and all wooly. I EVEN drew a picture of him! (which earned me a sticker!)
Soon after writing my first report, I remember talking to a girl on my bus about it. She was probably about 17 at that point. I remember her telling me that she also had to write a report, only hers had to be 3-5 pages long, and pictures weren't allowed. Yes it was the same girl as before, and yes she scared the shit out of me again.
I now dreaded the day that I had to learn crazy math and write long reports.
Ironically this post is probably multiple pages long and I'm doing it at will.
A couple years down the road (5th grade-ish) I remember being given a specific assignment in my history class. We were forced to write a report (mine was about cavemen!) using at least 3 books and 1 magazine as sources. Spelling counted, as did our handwriting.
Being my typical self, I waited up until the second-to-last night to start it. Somehow my parents found out, freaked out on me, and made me sit down and do it. I did a shitty job apparently. Because when I was done they yelled at me, and all I really remember was my dad handing my his laptop and telling me he was going to teach me how to use it.
Although the internet did not exsist yet, WordPerfect did. My dad opened the program for me and said, "Type your report with this, I'll print it out tomorrow and you can hand it in the next day." The only stipulation was that he forced me to learn the program on my own because he was busy doing other stuff. I did figure it out, and I typed my report. The next day my dad came home from work with a dot matrix printing of it, I colored in the title page with colored pencils, and handed it in the next day.
I got an A.
My dad didn't know that spelling and handwriting counted. Two things you CAN'T mess up with a word processor.
From that report on, whenever my dad wasn't using his 486 laptop at home, I was playing with it. My teachers also urged me to keep using it to write reports.
By 7th grade I was down to a routine. Teachers would ask us to write reports and I would always type mine out for my dad to print.
One day my dad came home with a stack of papers, seperated into groups with paperclips, and said, "Here, these are for you." I was currently working on a report comparing feudal Europe to feudal Japan- Knights vs. Samurais!
The stack of papers were different reports about knights and samurais...wait..."Who's reports are these dad?"
"I got them off the internet."
No kid. NO KID, these days, will know that feeling. In that single moment, my entire fear of the Dewey Decimal system was demolished (unfortunetly my fear for math remained).
One of the single most life-altering points in my life was when my dad, and eventually myself, could simply do a search on subject and within SECONDS have a listing of 10's, 100's, 1000's of sources of information on it.
No other generation will have ever gone through the confusion of learning, and I stress LEARNING, embedded in our heads, that accomplished for us by our forefathers were these FACTS OF LIFE:
-to be successful handwriting was important
-dictionaries and thesauras' needed to be purchased and used frequently
-researching involves libraries because that's where books are and expensive volumes of encyclopedias are
-the overall importance of using an atlas, globe, and farmer's almanac to research history
-the only way of getting around is using maps, compasses, and scales
etc. etc. just to have it BLOWN out of the water.
completely gone.
Because of computers and the internet. We were the only generation to go from pre-internet to internet.
All that was left to master was ctrl+c and ctrl+v.
