OK. I’m going to confess something here. You can feel free to laugh all you want; I don’t mind.
*Deep breath…sigh*
Here goes….
I’m not sure how this blogging thing is supposed to work.
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Done snickering yet? OK.
It’s true, though. It’s all a fairly new phenomenon for me. This whole Web 2.0 thing—whatever that means—is a little daunting. If you don’t mind taking a brief trip into my past, you might come to understand why….
I was born in June 1979. (In case you’re not so quick with math, that means that I’m 28 as I write this.) My birthday was about a year and a half after the first old-style BBS (simply called “the Computerized Bulletin Board System”, or CBBS) went online. So that makes me a little too young to have been really involved with them. Nor am I old enough to have been part of the Usenet/GEnie/CompuServe/etc. culture that was the Internet in its youth.
However, I was around for the debut of the Worldwide Web, that strange HTTP entity we know and love (or hate) today. Not long after it went online, sometime around ‘94 or ‘95, I was part of a select group of students at my high school to attend a week’s worth of classes at Oregon State University, learning how to “browse” the web—using Netscape Navigator 4, no less. (Anybody remember that browser?)
It was around that same time that my family purchased our first PC, thanks to a meager financial inheritance my mom received upon her father’s death. I don’t remember what it was. Some IBM clone from Wal-Mart; I don’t remember which brand for sure. It was a 486, if that means anything to any of you. Those were the days before Pentium processors, mind you. It was a little late, though, for me to be one of those people with fond memories of their Tandy, Amiga, VIC-20, or Commodore 64, although I had friends like that. My wife, Nancy, is such a person, in fact. (We did own an Apple IIc for a while, though. Got it for 50 bucks through the middle school my brother attended, because he needed it due to a learning disability. I have fond memories of programming in BASIC on that computer. I also have fond memories of my early gaming consoles, the Atari 2600 and the NES.)
So, anyway, it came with one of those free AOL trial packs. We tried it. It wasn’t free even during the trial period, because the toll-free lines were always busy, and we had to connect using a long-distance number. So we didn’t have Internet access for very long. Mostly I used it for playing games, writing stories, and doing homework—not necessarily in that order.
I think it was around 1997 or ‘98 that we finally got a dial-up service. That’s just after I graduated high school and got a job at Wal-Mart, thus enabling me to purchase my own computer, an Acer. In 1999, I met my future wife, Nancy, and moved in with her. She had Internet access on her computer, and we maintained that access until 2001, when extreme financial difficulties forced us to give it up.
For those three years that I had consistent Internet access, I didn’t really do much with it. I never really found the necessity. I had a basic GeoCities page (which I programmed with HTML code—no WYSIWYG editors for me), a Yahoo! email address, a Hotmail addy, and a couple of chatrooms that I frequented. I did quite a bit of research for school, and I even took an online college course. Other than that, I think I spent a lot of time looking at Star Trek, X-Files, and other science fiction TV stuff.
I spent quite a bit of time gaming, too. And I don’t mean MUDs or MUSHes or MMORPGs. I’m talking offline. Old-school stuff on CD-ROM and 3.5″ floppy, some of which even ran in MS-DOS. Star Wars games, Doom, Myst, etc. I never got into the Sims series. Definitely didn’t do World of Warcraft online. I played real games.
And I wrote quite a bit, of course. No matter what else comes up in life, there’s always the writing. To rip off a line from the late Robert Jordan, I’ll be writing ’til they nail shut my coffin—not that I plan on actually having a coffin, but that’s a different blog entry.
So…2001. The first year of the 21st century, and me without access to the Internet. (Also without cable for a large amount of the time. I had been raised with cable. Despite the fact that my family was pretty much destitute, my mother insisted on having cable. I was a TV junkie as a kid, and well into my late teen years. I’m much better now.) I went years without Internet access. Then, in 2005, Nancy quit her job at Wal-Mart (where she had worked for 13 years), cashed in her 401(k) and profit-sharing and bought me a PowerBook. My dream come true. (Throughout all the years I had been stuck using Windows-based PCs, I had envied all those groovy Mac-type people out there—even back in the days of System 7.) Soon thereafter, I got a credit card with a $2,000 limit, maxed it out, and surprised my wife with her own laptop (an iBook). Built in AirPort cards put us both one step closer to the Internet. We couldn’t afford a connection at home, though, so for some time, we used free Wi-Fi access at various places around town. I soon found my niche at a great little café called the Scoop, and I spend quite a few hours a week there.
Anyway, the point is…the Internet had changed quite a bit even in the few years I was offline. It had been upgraded. It had become Web 2.0, which Wikipedia (itself a Web 2.0 technology) defines, in part, as: “Technologies such as weblogs (blogs), social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, web application programming interfaces (APIs), and online web services such as eBay and Gmail….”1
While other people had made a smooth transition, step by step, from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, it was as though I had been resurrected from a lengthy period of suspended animation and thrust suddenly into the future.
I learned that the HTML I once knew was outdated, replaced by things such as DHTML, XHTML, CSS, and what I had known as fledgling languages like JavaScript and Flash. And I was overwhelmed by the proliferation of all those new technologies mentioned in the Wikipedia quotation above. The wired world that had been mere fancy in the days of Web 1.0 was now reality. Cyberspace had been transformed. It had not been totally unexpected, of course, but I was not prepared for the specific changes that I met upon entering this new online world. What was I to do?
To be continued….
1 “Web 2.0“. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Founda- tion, Inc. Accessed 11 Dec 2007.
