In Grade 6 (1983), my class was led into a room at the far end of a hallway on the second floor of St. Avila Elementary School. We were given a look at the two coveted Apple computers our school had just acquired.
Look is the operative word. There was no touching, and I recall our teacher telling us our futures were about to change with this inventive box with the cute logo. Moving on to junior high the next year, my parents had me sign up for a computer class. My heart was set on taking drama, but they said computers would take me further.
As I think back on it now, our teacher Mr. Grape probably had no idea what to do with us or the computers that were new to the school. I remember him being an innovative, favourite teacher and coach in all other areas of our lives but in computers. All we did was switch between timed typing exercises and a computer geography game called Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I'm curious, in retrospect, what kind of instruction he was given on computers before we set foot in his classroom.
By university, we had a family computer to type up and print off term papers. There was the painfully slow printer that pumped out pages attached by tear-off margins in an accordion pile at your feet and added a good 10 minutes to reassemble the final product in the correct order.I suffered acute frustration because the computer often didn't seem to compute what I was putting into it. There were last minute, mad-dash phone calls to professors as deadlines loomed, holding the phone out so they could hear the sounds of the printer zinging away as proof that it wasn't I that was late, it was the printer holding me up.
I have resisted the computer as much as anyone can.
I was almost arrogant about my ability to go through life quite acceptably without relying on an automated machine that I thought robbed people of social interaction and physical action. I lived a lot of my life in the outdoors away from technology of any kind, and the freedom was bliss.
Going back to school as a mature student last year, my cohorts were aghast that I was not on Facebook, a social website that allows you to create a personal page with photo albums and "chat" with friends and family live or to leave messages on "walls." I sent and received many late night communications from my fellow classmates and those quick messages were a comfort in deadline stressful times.
I use a computer in my everyday life now, too. I try to imagine what a journalist's work was like when they had to rely on the phone, the wire and good old-fashioned legwork to get their stories and background research. During a course last year about the history of communication, the majority of my classmates were 18 years my junior. Many were adamant that newspapers will become obsolete any day. They are a generation used to being able to access information instantaneously via the Internet. It makes me wonder if I should be taking another computer class so I don't become obsolete within this industry as well, as the news moves on to high-speed frequencies.
I am happy we have a strong readership in this community and our website is fairly basic, which means most people actually pick up the paper to read it. But I am curious how everyone gets their provincial, national and international news. Even I, the resistor, now use the Internet to learn about current events more often than buying a paper.