A Technological Late Bloomer
I did not have full access to the internet until 2015. While that is not a shocking statement at home, I am betting that it is interesting to hear coming from a 20 year old who now relies on the internet for everything from completing her college classes to keeping in touch with her friends and family. With such a late start, you can imagine my relationship with technology has been a rocky one.
My generation is the first to have digital technology at their fingertips at nearly every stage of their lives. The exception to this rule: my siblings and me. You could call my parents old fashioned, but they simply did not see the necessity of having tech strewn around the house. To them, it was just a wormhole of bad influences and danger. To their credit, in my five years living on the World Wide Web, I have seen what they were so worried about.
Growing up, we had one computer in the house, just like 61.8% of American households (Statista, 2021). It was a chunky monitor bigger than my 5 year old self complete with its accompanying tower, running louder than my cartoons on Saturday mornings. Just because it was there doesn’t mean I had access to it though! The computer, trapped in a prison — rather a large wooden cabinet — was used bi-monthly by my mother to make baby announcements and to check her AOL e-mail. It wasn’t until my eldest sister turned 11 that we got more access to the machine past hearing it chime, “you’ve got mail!” throughout the day. All four of us girls were crammed around one monitor to watch my sister beat the computer in a CD-ROM version of checkers. That phenomenon happened weekly for an hour on Saturdays.
Inside my home, there was no connection to the internet that was slowly becoming a topic of conversation in my elementary school classroom. Years went on, and I graduated to middle school. Beside me, my classmates were graduating to iPods and cellphones. Suddenly, Snapchats and Instagram posts were being discussed at the lunch table. My relationship with the internet started to resemble standing outside of a party, watching through the window. I could see it, hear about it, be invited to it, but I wasn’t allowed in.
My relationship with the internet started to resemble standing outside of a party, watching through the window. I could see it, hear about it, be invited to it, but I wasn’t allowed in.
This started to change when sleepover activities switched from watching Disney movies to crafting the perfect Snapchat to your best friend’s crush as a group. Suddenly, I got to ride backseat to the internet action and witness the changes social media caused to all of my friends. A bonus to my exclusion to that hands-on experience: I was saved from the peer pressure and social embarrassment that usually followed when those apps were downloaded.
At 13, I was gifted an iPod touch for my birthday. With technology at my fingertips, I felt unstoppable and all too grown up. The problem: I still didn’t have wifi at home to join in with my friends on social media. So while everyone else was playing iMessage games and posting pictures online, I was playing Angry Birds. Behind yet again, I didn’t understand the memes and videos shared through my friend group, and sleepover invites all happened through Snapchat.
I learned to adapt to the challenges life without internet posed, problem by problem. While social media and gaming progressed, as did the reliance on technology in school. Starting in middle school, we were assigned school Chromebooks to complete online assignments and to type papers. These computers stayed at the school overnight back then, but in high school, we were expected to take them home and complete all of our work with them. This issue pushed my parents to move forward with getting a hotspot on their phones, allowing us to access the internet, in a very limited capacity, while they were off work. Somehow, I managed to get my work done for the first two years of high school.
My junior year, I finally got a cellphone. After years of exclusion and and confusion, I actually had access to the world everyone else knew so well. I joined the social media sites my friends had since dominated. I added all my high school friends on Snapchat. I started sharing statuses on Facebook. I could complete my homework on my own time!
Now, an avid technology user, I have integrated digital media and the internet into nearly every part of my life. Just in time too, as I was very slowly adjusting to technology, the world around me had already become dependant on it. I joined in just in time to have no other option. According to a study conducted in 2019, 28% of Americans describe themselves as being constantly online (Pew Research Center). No longer did I observe others be part of that statistic; I joined the masses and was constantly online. I learned to express myself in writing on sites like Wattpad, a site many used for fanfiction, but one I utilized to publish short stories. I now rely on the internet to talk to my relatives daily. Before this age of dependence, I would speak to them once a year at holidays. Constantly on Twitter and Instagram, social media became a source for current events and discussion for me.
2020 alone proved how dependent we all are on technology. As someone still fairly new to it, that dependence seems even stronger. Parts of my life that were still relatively technology-free — college courses, for example — became entirely online. My college campus alone moved 33% of their courses to an online environment to reduce the population on campus (For students, 2020). I could no longer write notes without a technological distraction. My professors were only found on my laptop screen. Exams became harder because I could not take paper to pencil. The distraction of the vast internet at my fingertips, all day, every day, has made life so much busier.
Now, in 2021, some normalcy has started to creep in around the looming pandemic, and I’ve been allowed to attend in-person courses again. The technological balance is starting to be restored, just in time too. I still depend on the internet for entertainment, communication, and education; however, moving forward, I’d like to spend less time “logged on” and more time in the real world. That isn’t to say I won’t hop back on to write about it time to time.
