#had the whole thing on my pink ipod mini and was ADDICTED

[pandr-bur]

i fear this is severely underrated

literally best album of the 2000s

༼ ༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ༽

[sfastner-blog]

Confessions from a Digital “Native”

I remember the sound of the Dial-up internet from when I was young. Initially, only my brothers and dad used it. Any time someone needed to make a call, we would have to practically pry my older brother from the computer. My parents used to think he was obsessed with it.

My initial experience with computers myself was playing games on CD-ROM or Floppy Discs. To learn how to use them, I would copy my youngest older brother and play Flinstones Bowling and Rollercoaster Tycoon. In Elementary School, everyone would play online Mini Clip games when we got free time in the computer lab. Whenever the class would discover a new game, everyone would be bad at it except one or two people. As days and free time on the computers passed, we would all become much better through trial-and-error, until we eventually grew bored of it and found something new.

The time spent playing games gradually transitioned to social media in late elementary school through hybrid social media and game websites designed to target kids. Examples of this include Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Neopets. My whole class would play together and figure out the social etiquette of playing with our pets online. I remember my friend and I would agree to meet on Webkinz at the same time after school so that our pets could visit each other’s houses. I was always jealous that she had more pets than me.

MySpace was my first “grown up” social media site. When I first started, I would try to mimic my classmates’ and brothers’ pages, copying and pasting html code from other websites to make my profile cool. It was fun to decorate our MySpace pages with so many things that it would take five minutes to even load. You would quickly learn what online behavior is acceptable among your peers by seeing how other people interact with each other. The number of friends you had and who you placed in your top ten were important symbols of popularity and social status between classmates.

In 7th grade, after having MySpace for a year, my brother helped me make a Facebook. It seemed more mature to me since I had learned about it from my older brother in college. People seemed to be disappointed that they couldn’t personalize their profiles on Facebook like they could on MySpace, but we all slowly hopped on the band wagon anyway and transitioned from MySpace to Facebook. Eventually our parents, teachers, and other older adults followed as well.

Toward the end of high school, my parents caved and I received my first iPhone. It was pink and plastic and I was obsessed. While I had always checked social media websites like Facebook and Twitter frequently, they were suddenly attached to me at all times. I wasn’t used to the constant accessibility and it became hard to ignore. Not only that, but the number of social media websites was increasing as well. Everyone had to have Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter, etc. The number of favorites or likes you got on a Tweet or an Insta post determined how cool you were in the eyes of the student body, so it was important to make sure your public image was maintained 24/7.

Lately, my peers no longer appear to post everything that happens to them on Facebook. We’ve somewhat outgrew the need to constantly share things in that way and have transitioned to highly selective and polished-to-fit-our-image Instagram posts and Tweets. My parents’ generation, however, doesn’t seem to have moved as far in that direction; some thinking that they just aren’t as good at technology.

But what even makes us “good” at technology? My dad is a computer software engineer for Intel; he knows more of the ins and outs of how computers operate than I could imagine. It’s not, however, an uncommon occurrence for the man to call me with a question about how to use his smart phone or iPod.

In contrast, I’ve never considered my mother to be skilled at technology. She still calls CD’s, tapes and doesn’t know how to change her desktop wallpaper. However, she is a Facebook and Words with Friends addict and can tell me what all of my extended family are up to on any given day.

So what does make someone necessarily skilled at technology? Familiarity with apps and social media? Or knowledge of our operating systems? When I was younger, I was interested in how computers worked and wanted to be an engineer like my dad and oldest brother. I ended up being a science major, not an engineer, but I still feel like I am skilled at technology, even though I know far less about how computers work than my dad and am not nearly as active on Facebook as my mom.

Maybe it is how easily we adapt to new technology that makes us skilled. I can figure out new devices and software much faster than either of my parents. It’s possible that the slow processes of learning how to use MySpace and Facebook and Club Penguin when I was younger made me better at navigating new technology later in life.

As far as social media goes, it could just be that I’ve used it longer. When I was younger, I made many Facebook posts and was always interacting with other posts. Now, I no longer use it in that way. How my mother uses it now reminds me of how I used to use it. Maybe, in a few years, she will move on to Instagram and I’ll be using something else.

It's ironic that my parents used to think my brother was too obsessed with the internet, seeing how attached all of us are to it now. Technology has become an integral part of our society and, even though I wasn’t born knowing how to use it, (like some Digital Native believers seem to think), I can’t imagine not having it in my life.