When I'm an old lady and my grandkids come to visit, I imagine telling them in a cranky old-person voice (and for some reason it's also got a bad Southern accent), "You know when I was a little girl we had to type in a word on our computer screen to bring up a program? If you forgot the word to type in you would never find the thing! Now we got these operating systems and shortcuts on the desktop so all you gotta do is click the little picture!" Except by then we probably won't even have operating systems. I'm betting computers will be controlled by our brains.
But really, in the last twenty years I've seen technological advances I didn't think were possible in my lifetime. My little friends and I used to joke, "In a hundred years, I bet when you call up your friends it'll be on a computer screen and you'll see their face when you talk to them!" Enter Skyping. "In a hundred years, I bet we won't even need handheld controls to play video games. Our motions be the controller!" Enter Kinnect. Maybe my friends and I just didn't have a grasp on how fast technology was already speeding up, but honestly when I look around and see my childhood fantasies being fulfilled already, I wonder what on earth WILL be around in a hundred years. Forget brain-controlled computers; those will be old news by 2112.
I think because I see these fantasies already coming true I get a little nervous. Going back to the old granny voice, "When I was a little girl and we went to the computer lab they taught us about internet safety. Basically, they told us scary stories about little kids getting kidnapped because some guy in a chatroom found out their name and where they lived!" And I'm still nervous about that kind of thing. I didn't get Facebook forever because I wasn't sure you could really trust that some guy in Georgia named Earl wasn't going to figure out where you lived and what time you were home alone from the information you and your friends shared. I know that's paranoia at its worst, but that's how I still feel about a lot of things. You could say this blog is facing one of my biggest fears: putting my name in the public.
So, to answer the question, "How digitally civilized am I?" I'd say not very. I can check an e-mail, and I can browse a website, but my personal contribution to the digital world is next to nothing. And even my consumption of our digital civilization is low. After the "new big thing" comes out I usually wait a while to try it out. I'm considreing gettting an iPhone in the next 10 years. Partly out of the desire to save money, partly because I don't see the need. But I am curious about what it can do for me. And I'm kind of a trend follower... and when I say follower I mean at a distance. Like, last place in the race.
All in all, I'd say I'm a little ambivalent about our digital world. I love that I don't have to go to a library or encyclopedia for information anymore ("You know when I was your age we didn't have google!") and I love that I can be so connected to my friends and family through the web, and I just love YouTube and Hulu. But I've still got this old paranoia about it, and maybe even a fear of becoming disconnected in our universe where you don't even need to speak to talk.
So, let's call this blog my experiment. Don't knock it 'til you try it, right? I'll learn the benefits and the downsides, and maybe see our digital civilization as just that: civilization.
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