My brother Tyler doesn’t remember the days before our first computer arrived. It was a Gateway 2000, packed in their signature black and white box. He was 2 years old.
While the rest of my family was adjusting to it, pondering its deeper meanings and beaming with pride that we’d joined our hip friends and neighbors, he was playing games and making himself at home with this strange piece of machinery.
He’s 11 now and has used it on all of his major school projects. Having to recopy pages of book reports to correct the spelling is alien to him. A little red line corrects his spelling, though he often disagrees with it.
It will only be a few years until Tyler’s generation of computer users is in college. We older folk who remember what it was like to adjust to these advances are a historical footnote. We are the last kids — the last middle-class kids, anyway — to grow up without computers and the Internet.
In fact, some current Northwestern students might not even fit that category — that’s how fast it’s shrinking. The Kaiser Family Foundation found last year that 77 percent of 1,000 families with children have computers at home, and almost all of those have Internet access. The kids who used computers spent about an hour using it per day — and these are children 6 and under.
Out generation has become jaded, and we’re rarely thrilled by computers anymore. They’re such important fixtures in our lives that we take them for granted. Soon, many kids in pre-school will feel the same way.
A quick test: Do you remember the ear-splitting, strangled vacuum sound you used to get when signing on with America Online? The days when a 56K modem was top of the line? Did you ever get kicked off when the telephone rang? Or spend minutes downloading even the smallest files? Can you recall a day when you didn’t think to check your e-mail every five to 10 minutes?
If so you’re part of the generation who knew the Web as the Wild West, a dangerous place that in the future people will doubt ever existed. We’re old news. Internet providers know we’re already hooked for life, so they’re turning their attention elsewhere.
Tyler, and millions of kids like him, comprise the new generation of Internet users. The World Wide Web is being remade for them. AOL — which billed itself as “the Internet on training wheels” — is making that assessment ever more literal with AOL For Kids. Ads touting pro-child features are ubiquitous. The Web has been domesticated, or at least made about as safe as television.
The first time I saw a computer, I was a little younger than Tyler is now. It was a boxy Commodore with a black screen and green type, and it only did those simple programs. I could never make them work and I couldn’t see how these machines would be useful to anybody.
Now, that attitude reminds me of the people who thought “talkies” would be just a fad and the riders who yelled “Get a horse!” to motorists working on their stalled Model T’s.
I just hope Tyler and his friends will give an old man a lift.
Marley Seaman is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected].
