Over the last couple of days, I have been reading a thread on my daughter's facebook page that was set off by her writing of a light hearted little note last week. It was her first foray into public note writing, and the outcome has hardly been what she, or anyone really, could have expected. Well over 200 comments later, the debate has raged, and continues to range, far and wide from the original topic, fueled, in part at least, from the college students in her world weighing in with well thought out and pretty interesting opinions.
It has been fascinating for me to see how these former children have become adults; how their thought processes, once so shallow and careless, based on their momentary whims, have deepened and broadened and expanded far beyond anything that would have been imaginable just a few short years ago. I think there are some teachers out there who would be astonished to see what the capabilities of their former students really were, hiding behind the intellectual laziness they exhibited in high school.
My ability to partake vicariously, but from a safe distance, in the lively intellectual debate that is now roiling, is sort of thrilling for me. I get to enjoy the benefits of their knowledge without having to reveal my own rapidly increasing ignorance. Although I am their elder by many years, it seems they are far more well read and educated than I, and their discussion has gone beyond my limited knowledge quite a few times over, at this point. But none the less, I am an interested spectator in the discussion, made possible by a medium that, when I was a college student myself, was still in its infancy, and for which my own generation was the vanguard.
How far we have come in connectedness is easy for me to measure, because when I was in college 25 years ago, I participated in a hands on way in the personalizing of computing on my college campus. My then boyfriend was a key person in bringing personal computers to St. Olaf, and he would occasionally, when time was tight, allow me to help him build the Heathkits to which the school was gradually transforming.
When I was in high school, computing was a time consuming and noisy affair, pursued under the watchful eye of the office staff in my little rural district. I am not certain how we ever got the computer in the first place. My small school was hardly on the cutting edge of recent technological advances, as a general rule. [Don't get me wrong here, it was a good school, and I got a very decent education there. But we were not a frills seeking community, and our school district reflected that.] My impression is that the University of Minnesota had some sort of grant to connect themselves with rural parts of the state via mainframe and modem, but I might be completely off on that.
At any rate, when you wanted to use the computer, you had to go into the Principal's office, where you would, under the strictest supervision, use a modem to get online to the U of M. [This was back in the day when we didn't have unlimited long distance cell phones, and there was the gravest concern that we might misuse the district phone to call, oh, I don't know, Minneapolis or something, I guess. Which was pretty bizarre, really, since most of us didn't know too many people outside of our own town, anyway, and probably anyone we did know that we would have wanted to talk to was in school themselves. But I digress. As usual.]
It was a tangible process back then, not simply clicking an icon for Mozilla or internet explorer, like you do now, but actually having to dial the phone and wait for the pinging sound, then all in a rush connect the receiver via a big modem box. If I think about it, I can still hear the squeaking sound as you pushed the phone receiver down into the rubber cradle that served as the holster for the audio technology that allowed us that precious access.
The procedure, while aggravatingly slow, reminded me each time I went through it that it was something out of the ordinary that I was doing. It was exciting, almost like traveling to another world, because suddenly, you were not just in your little school, but connected with The University, with all those possibilities just waiting to be tapped.
Of course, in reality, the only possibility for us was to play a single game, Oregon Trail. We would go back and forth, printing out on a dot matrix printer attached to the terminal the various options, then we would key in our choices and wait anxiously to see how it played out. I don't know if kids still play Oregon Trail these days, but back then, it was a Big Deal for us, and really a lot of fun. It was a thrill, for me, at least, to think that I was connected to a major university in some small way, and that the resources at their disposal were suddenly also at mine. Never, in a million years, could I have visualized the resources of the entire world available with a click at that point. It was the stuff of science fiction then, James Bond or Maxwell Smart come to life.
Fast forward to college, and suddenly, I was on campus with computer terminals, which were a pretty major breakthrough from my limited perspective, although possibly run of the mill for kids from more wealthy areas. A terminal, for the youth who were not around then, was a monitor and keyboard that were connected via cable to a mainframe computer somewhere else. If memory serves me correctly, and that is a big if, we each had an account of some kind on the mainframe, so we could access and store information on it. However, my memory is sketchy at the best of times, so I could be completely off base there, I'm not sure.
As a side note, we took a class to learn Basic programming, which I am happy to say I did pretty well in, considering the amounts of math, which I'm guessing were pretty limited, exceeded my even more limited ability. I might have considered programming or computer science for a career, except for that math required. Even those who love me will become exasperated upon watching me try to resolve two plus two, so it was not going to be a possibility that I would ever succeed in programming.
But getting back on track, that brings me to building the Heathkit computers, and my then boyfriend. His name was John, and he was employed by whichever department of the school was in charge of computers. Personal computers were in their infancy at that time, mainframes the size of rooms were the norm, and the concept of having a computer that you could keep entirely to yourself, with information stored directly on that machine, was pretty alien still. But the college itself, and especially John, saw the possibilities, and they set out to transform the campus.
They bought the computers as actual kits, which then had to be built from the parts, sort of like building a model car or a model plane. I'm not sure how John wound up with the job of building the computers, although he was a math and physics genius, so I imagine he knew someone who knew someone, and that was how he found his employment.
Throughout the whole building process, for which I was frequently on hand, I personally learned soldering guns have many uses, none of which have anything to do with soldering. I also learned that computer circuit boards are very fragile, and do not appreciate having hot plastic dropped on them anywhere. Just saying....
In the end, if all went well, which it always did when John did the building, but not so much if I had a hand in it, you would wind up with a functional, if extremely bulky and not very high tech personal computer. I was proud to be assigned the job of affixing the various stickers wherever they belonged - apparently, that was the function to which I was best suited, and least costly to the school. I may vaguely recall a conversation in which I was told that I should never be trusted near a soldering iron again, but perhaps I am imagining things?
The Heathkit had a hard drive, of sorts, with about 4K of RAM, which would allow it to boot up and at least get started, but you also had to carry around your 5.25 inch floppy disks everywhere you went. While hard drive failure today is a life shattering crisis, it was no less so then, when your disk got bent or otherwise failed, and you lost your hard work in an instant. Most people learned to make back-ups after one disaster, although many continued to tempt fate, much as they do today, in fact. Some things never change, I guess, and people who tempt fate will always do so, apparently. But if you bent a disk, at least it was only one paper, or perhaps a few, instead of your entire life. Having said that, of course, I haven't backed up either of my computers in a year, so who am I to talk?
As I moved into graduate school, personal computers got smaller, and Apple, who was the dominant brand at that time, (Bill Gates hadn't blasted onto the scene just yet,) primarily because they aggressively marketed to schools, decided to release a pc that was portable. I'm not sure what made them think this was a realistic plan; LCD was still little more than a distant vision, and the monitor was anything but easily moved. However, they produced the Apple IIc, a computer that I used for many years, and which was the very first computer my son, now 23, ever used.
We still have that computer, in fact, in a box in the basement, a relic of a simpler life and time, but one which I can't quite bear to toss away, as if it was a useless piece of trash instead of the life changing machine it became. The color monitor, a serious upgrade back then, is still crystal clear, and better than many monitors available today, I think. I booted it up not too long ago, and was astonished at the clarity and color possible from that little CRT. Naturally, it is incompatible with any computer currently in use, but as I said, I can't bear to part with it, anyway, so there it sits, neglected, if not forgotten.
After many years of dragging my heels, it became apparent to me that our family required a decent computer. Adam was doing homework on it, as his handwriting was completely illegible, and the IIc just wasn't up to the job any longer. The programs and capabilities which were now available were simply too rich to resist, so we joined the modern world and entered into the windows environment.
It wasn't too much after that moment when we joined the world wide web through our dial-up AOL connection, and in that instant, our family, and our world, changed forever. Suddenly, even in that primitive state, we were in instant connection with people across the globe. We could find out information simply by searching, more tediously back then, to be sure, but still available, through our AOL browser. When we upgraded to the desktop which I still use for work, we upgraded our access as well to high speed, and now, we were part of the online superhighway, which opened even greater possibilities for us all.
Which brings me back to the facebook discussion, which I have enjoyed enormously. It is easy to argue the negative points of the internet, just as it is easy to argue the positives. But there is simply no debating that it keeps us connected to people who are not here, and allows us to maintain relationships with people who we may not even really know. It has broadened our horizons, and enlarged our perspectives in a way that time and space formerly prevented, and all in a moment we can converse in real time with people who challenge our beliefs and foster intellectual growth.
The discussion started by my daughter's simple note was continued by her older brother, who thought she needed a helping hand, since as so often happens, some negative criticism was tossed her way by a thoughtless classmate. It is very little different than the old fashioned line, "My brother can beat up your brother," except it is intellectual instead of physical, and at some remove, where it is safer and less threatening.
With over 900 facebook friends to date, most of them from her own school, the others friends of friends, my daughter has more exposure to thoughts and ideas than I had in my entire childhood. In researching her homework, she has access to information from across the globe. She can see pictures from the Hubble telescope that reach parts of the universe we have never seen before, and she can find obscure data about topics that I didn't even know existed.
I have always been a big believer in education. I think knowledge is power, and I think the more exposure you have to other ideas, the more firm your understanding of your own beliefs will be. In the last few days, I have been consistently challenged and amused and entertained by young adults, who only a few years ago would have considered the decision on which popsicle they wanted, to be the most intellectually important answer of their day.
If the next 25 years have the same kind of cyber progress as the last 25 years, I have to wonder what exciting advances the future holds for our children and grandchildren. I can honestly say, sitting in my high school Principal's office, I never imagined for even a moment the possibilities that were waiting just around the corner. I never could have envisioned that I would end each night chatting with my mom on a computer from the comfort and privacy of my own bed while I was 425 miles away from her. But I can imagine that our great-grandparents never dreamed of a world in which they could make a call on a little instrument and talk to someone hundreds or thousands of miles away, either.
The world is in need of dreamers, it seems, people who look past what is possible to what is imaginable. I am excited for the future, as I listen to the people who will create it. I have said it many times before, but the youth of our world energize me. They see the world as a whole, and in full color. I believe their connectedness is both a blessing and a bane, as too much of anything can be bad for you. But at the same time, they are exposed to so many alternative thoughts and opinions and ideas, it forces them to think more critically about their conclusions.
Perhaps every generation is forced to look over their shoulder with a combination of awe and fear. But I think more than anything else, the opportunities that our children will create will be exciting and fun to watch, and will expand our world in ways that we cannot even imagine right now. Just as I have wondered what my own dad, who has been gone for about 35 years, would think if he were to come back today (I think he would be excited to see many of the advancements, especially hand held camcorders,) I wonder what I will say to my grandchildren about the changes I will see in the years to come.
Maybe someday I will be telling them about the olden days, when we used laptops and cell phones to talk with people across the world.
