My first impression of the internet...

As I wrote my last post, I remembered what my first impressions of the internet--and so, as a (perhaps odd) member of "generation digital" I thought I would post those thoughts here.

When I was growing up, Google didn't exist. Fact. The library that I went to as a child didn't even have a sophisticated "online" book catalog. To order a book from the system, you had to type into an ancient-looking computer, and then write out by hand an order form for that book to give to the librarian.

For me, the internet always seemed like this ominous creature (one that could potentially swallow little children who played with it too long--apparently adults were immune!) There was internet access at the library, but you had to be a certain age to use it. Furthermore, it was only my father who seemed to know what the internet was and how to use it--during the course of my siblings and my studies, we would ask him questions that weren't in the encyclopedia, and so my father would (presumably) go to this foreign and dangerous place and bring back the desired answers.

Finally, when I was about 8 or 9 (or perhaps I was 10?), the internet came to our house.

I remember sending my first email, and my first exposure to this ominous wonderland of knowledge.

"Googling-it", wasn't a term people used back then.

To the common person (like me), words like "blog," "link," and "youtube" were foreign. Social networking sites, other than chatrooms, were unheard of in my house (to be quite frank, when I first started using the internet, Mark Zuckerburg hadn't even invented facebook yet...in fact, I'm not sure if he had even graduated from highschool yet...).

So, am I from the dark ages or what?

Nope! I was born in the early 1990s--on the proverbial "cusp" of the digital generation!

The people who are just a few years younger than me can't even recall a time when they didn't have the internet. I count myself among one of the lucky few who can :)

Cheers!