LJ Idol Survivor: Final Immunity Challenge, Day 8

[flipflop_diva]

I look around for my phone. I know I left it here somewhere. I check the floor, my pockets, behind the couch.

And then I find it. Ellie has it. She’s lying back against the couch cushions, scrolling through the notifications like she has important business to attend to.

No matter that she can’t read yet, and probably won’t for three more years. She still likes to scroll. Sometimes she finds the camera button and takes accidental selfies of her hair or her foot. She also really likes the photos I have on there of her, especially the one on the home screen.

“Ellie!” she says every time she sees it, pointing to the picture of herself.

Today, when I manage to get my phone back from her, I notice she’s somehow turned the brightness down to almost nothing. I thank her for my phone and fix the settings.

My stepmom has already mentioned getting her a kid tablet for her birthday this year. She’ll be three in November.

It always strikes me how much different her life, especially in terms of technology, is going to be than mine.

The very first computers I ever used, and probably ever saw, were the ones in the computer lab at elementary school. Our class got to visit once every other week for half an hour. Most of the time we played The Oregon Trail. I often died of dysentery. I think I maybe won once. It was a very exciting moment.

There were some other games too. One retail-focused one where we had to make cakes or something like that. It doesn’t stand out as much in my memories as The Oregon Trail.

By the time I headed off to middle school, my dad decided to purchase a computer for the house. He wanted it to help with some of the work he had to do at nights or on weekends.

After he’d had it for a few months, he decided my sister and I could use it to play some educational games. He and my mom bought us “Where in the World is Carmel Sandiego?”

We gathered around the desk in his office, notebooks in hand to take notes, as he showed us what to do. Turn on the power and wait for the computer to load. Type in the DOS commands, wait more, type in more commands, wait more, and eventually, our game would load and we were able to play.

We only had permission to use the computer on weekends, and we would sit side-by-side on my dad’s big desk chair and play our game. The computer was a fascinating, yet scary, object. I lived in fear of accidentally breaking it or typing in the wrong thing.

Sometimes, I would watch my dad work. He showed me the commands to bring up the program where you could write papers. He said I could use it for classes if I ever needed to type anything.

The most exciting part was when he had to print something. The printer was huge, and loud. My sister and I would stand there in awe as the dot matrix printer moved back and forth, back and forth, over the paper until words appeared. It was almost magical!

I got my own huge, bulky computer when I went away to college. At least by then, Windows was a popular thing, and it was much easier to use than all the DOS commands.

On the first day of freshman orientation, I got my student ID, my schedule of classes and an email address. I stared at it in amazement, wondering what I would ever do with it.

It turned out most of my friends also got email addresses at their own various schools. When we talked on the phone or traded letters, we also traded email addresses. It was always so exciting back then to head to the computer lab and check my email and actually find a message from a friend!

My parents subscribed to Earthlink my junior year. When I was home on break, I showed them how to connect to the Internet — after making sure the phone line was free — and how to send email.

A week after I was back at school, I got a panicked phone call from my mom.

“I need help!” she said, sounding like she was close to tears. “I went on the Internet and now I can’t get off!”

“Mom,” I said, “but you are off the Internet.”

“No, it won’t disconnect!” she said. “You have to help me.”

“Mom,” I said compassionately. “The phone wouldn’t work if you were still connected to the Internet.”

“It wouldn’t?”

“Nope.”

“Oh! Well, okay. Thank you, honey.”

My mom got better at the Internet after that. The Internet also got better. So did phones. I never would have guessed then that a phone I held in my hand could connect me to people all over the world and bring me information that, when I was a kid, was only available in places like libraries and from maps.

Even back then, when I was in college and using my first computer for all my homework assignments, I never would have believed that using a computer would someday be second nature, let alone that my entire job would pretty much be done by it.

It won’t be like that for Ellie. Not ever. She’ll never know a time when the Internet wasn’t a thing. She won’t know what it was like when the only way you could talk to your friends was by phone or letter if you couldn’t see them in person. She won’t even know what it was like when the only phone in your house was connected to the wall by a long cord and if you called your friends and got a busy signal, it was the worst agony in the world.

She’ll probably have a tablet when she’s three. She’ll probably be able to use a laptop when she’s in kindergarten. It will just be something she learns how to do, a way of life that is just natural.

Sometimes I think she’s lucky. Other times, I think I was the lucky one.




Non-fiction.




Thank you for reading! This was written for therealljidol: Survivor Idol! We're at the final immunity challenge now, so there's no voting. We just write an entry every day until only one person is left standing.

That said, if you want to read the entries, you can find them all here.

Comments

[swirlsofpurple]

This is so relatable. And Ellie pointing at herself and saying Ellie sounds so cute!

[adoptedwriter]

It's so true. My dad worked in sales for Cincinnati Bell. Back in the 60s, he believed that phones would be like tiny TVs one day. He had nothing to go on but Star Trek episodes, but how right he was! We thought we were big stuff when we were "given" (as a test market product by the company) a phone that had speed dial for 7 numbers! LOL.

[alycewilson]

You took me on a trip down memory lane, remembering my early experiences with computers. We had our first desktop computer in the 80s with a color printer my Dad somehow never figured out how to use!

[gunwithoutmusic]

I really do wonder what the long-term ramifications will be of children having so much access to so much technology. In many ways, it can be a good thing, but in other ways, it can be a bad thing. I remember when we first got our computer and got the internet, and it was just absolutely amazing to me. But I also lived for probably fourteen years or so before we got good enough internet (that was separate from the phone line) that it was feasible to actually spend a ton of time online.

For me, now, the internet is a scary place, and I see what happens to people who spend their entire lives online, and I worry about the kids that are connected to the internet from the moment they can sit up. Will it be a good thing for them, or will they become addicted to online life at the expense of real life? I guess only time will tell. It's hard to believe how new all of this technology that we take for granted really is. When I was in my early 20s, I got a Motorola RAZR, which was a cutting edge, amazing phone at the time, but now would be looked at as an historical curiosity. And that was only around 10 years ago!

I really do wonder what the world will look like once these kids that were born online become adults.

[murielle]

When I was in school, after parking my dinosaur, I'd have to do everything in my head. One of my friend's parents had an adding machine and she got to do her arithmetic homework on it. When I found out I was so put-out. I mean, how unfair was that?!

I was in my thirties when I got my first computer. Now, can't imagine not having one. Not at all.

Thank you for writing this and reminding me that there once was a world without computers and I lived in it. ;-)

[halfshellvenus]

Oh, I urge you to resist getting Ellie a tablet! And I say this as a software engineer, but also as an "old person."

Limiting exposure to movies, television, screen-time of all sorts, helps kids learn and expand their imaginations. Inventing their own games, their own fantasies, getting involved in more physical play, in reading. Even boredom sparks creativity. ;)

This is an area where technology is not necessarily a good thing, especially at such a young age, and we so often don't even realize it.