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A Step Into the Information Age
It is certainly a challenge to think back to the first time I fired up a webpage and became enveloped in the never-ending gobs of information that the Internet provides its users. Over ten years have passed since that period in my life, so with this in mind I will do my best to remember the larger points of my earliest experience with the technology while tinkering with the finer details that helped make the experience memorable.
Though the Internet as we know it today was begun about a year shy of my entering Kindergarten in 1994, I was completely oblivious to its existence throughout my earliest school years. It wasn’t until around four years later that I came across a cartoon joke book giving reference to the web. As I remember it, it asked the question of how Spider-Man was able to research his enemies’ greatest weaknesses. The answer was, fittingly enough, the “World Wide Web.” To say that I was left clueless would be putting it quite well. What was this “web” and how could I go about finding it?
I asked my father about it, who told me that it was a place on the computer where a person could look up information. There were different pages, he told me, for all sorts of material in general. “You mean like there’s even a potato chip page?” I remember asking. It was certainly a childlike remark, but an idea that kept me continually interested in the idea of such a place.
It was in fifth grade at the newly opened Glenn C. Marlow Elementary that I was finally able to test drive the Internet for the first time. The year was 1999, which made the Internet six years old, Windows 98 (the operating system the school PCs ran on at the time) was two years old, and Google was just a mere three. As I was a tad late to the party and without any formal training on just how to make the Internet work, my first trips onto the web were met with some definite trial and error. Such things as a favorites toolbar and having to type out “www.” before each web page seemed utterly foreign to me.
The first web page that I can recall visiting was, alas, entirely unrelated to Potato Chips (although that would have made for a good story). The Rugrats section of the popular children’s television network Nickelodeon held host to some interactive games, such as being able to create a unique Rugrat from scratch and other such trivial matters. For me that experience was actually quite life changing. I may not have understood what was under the hood of this beast, but I recognized that if the Internet laid host to such irrelevant forms of entertainment including “Build Your Own Rugrat,” then there were certainly mounds of useful information that I could now locate by the touch of my fingertips. I also quickly came to understand the basics of how a search engine worked, using Yahoo! fairly extensively until I one day strolled across the likes of Google (and have never looked back).
These earliest experiences on the web most closely resemble Vannevar Bush’s vision of the Memex, I believe. I was there to gather information, either for my own entertainment or early forms of actual research for educational reasons. That we as a global society had acquired so much information that a one-stop-shop was needed to store it all was a fascinating idea to me.
I found (and still do today) that the Information Superhighway was a road in which I could travel at my leisure as needed, a notion that I believe is well supported in the following quote taken from Bush’s “As We May Think:” “His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.”
I did not dabble in the communication features of the Internet until quite a few years later. Certainly I was aware of the existence of email and even instant messaging, but felt absolutely no need at all to try them out in my initial days of exploring the web. There was simply no reason for me to talk to someone on the computer when I could just as easily call them on the phone (an idea that has strongly been revered in my psyche by this point). Message boards (if even they were existent in those days) and chat rooms had no worth to me, as I was there to look up information, not to force my pre-adolescent opinion on that of others.
In this way I can support my claim that my initial experience reflected the ideas of Bush, and give further bearing by contrasting my experience with the ideas of Nathanial Hawthorne. Did any of my early forays give any concern to society (in this case human interaction) becoming an “invisible presence,” as noted in his “Fire-Worship?” I can answer that quite bluntly: No. No, I did not see the Internet as a threat to ways of life – specifically communication and human interaction – at that time. As noted previously, communicating over the Internet simply held no value to me at the time. Without diving into this new realm of social interaction, how could I feel that the social world around me was threatened? Had I perceived it with a broader view beyond my personal social interactions and viewed how it was affecting others, my earlier views may have reflected those of Hawthorne in some sense, yet such a notion is hardly fit for a ten-year old.
The Internet has now long held a value in my life that no amount of books or television programs or any other medium conveying information has been able to suppress. The ability and even encouragement of being able to acquire nearly whatever information I please is so incredibly valuable to me in this modern culture. Yes, there are certainly valid arguments surrounding the fact that we are distracting ourselves with baseless information that has largely no relevance to our lives. These are arguments that Hawthorne would have vigorously supported, I believe. Yet my initial foray onto the Internet was met with no concerns of such. It was an incredible emergence into a realm of information that I never dreamed possible, and have most certainly (until now) never looked back.
Though the Internet as we know it today was begun about a year shy of my entering Kindergarten in 1994, I was completely oblivious to its existence throughout my earliest school years. It wasn’t until around four years later that I came across a cartoon joke book giving reference to the web. As I remember it, it asked the question of how Spider-Man was able to research his enemies’ greatest weaknesses. The answer was, fittingly enough, the “World Wide Web.” To say that I was left clueless would be putting it quite well. What was this “web” and how could I go about finding it?
I asked my father about it, who told me that it was a place on the computer where a person could look up information. There were different pages, he told me, for all sorts of material in general. “You mean like there’s even a potato chip page?” I remember asking. It was certainly a childlike remark, but an idea that kept me continually interested in the idea of such a place.
It was in fifth grade at the newly opened Glenn C. Marlow Elementary that I was finally able to test drive the Internet for the first time. The year was 1999, which made the Internet six years old, Windows 98 (the operating system the school PCs ran on at the time) was two years old, and Google was just a mere three. As I was a tad late to the party and without any formal training on just how to make the Internet work, my first trips onto the web were met with some definite trial and error. Such things as a favorites toolbar and having to type out “www.” before each web page seemed utterly foreign to me.
The first web page that I can recall visiting was, alas, entirely unrelated to Potato Chips (although that would have made for a good story). The Rugrats section of the popular children’s television network Nickelodeon held host to some interactive games, such as being able to create a unique Rugrat from scratch and other such trivial matters. For me that experience was actually quite life changing. I may not have understood what was under the hood of this beast, but I recognized that if the Internet laid host to such irrelevant forms of entertainment including “Build Your Own Rugrat,” then there were certainly mounds of useful information that I could now locate by the touch of my fingertips. I also quickly came to understand the basics of how a search engine worked, using Yahoo! fairly extensively until I one day strolled across the likes of Google (and have never looked back).
These earliest experiences on the web most closely resemble Vannevar Bush’s vision of the Memex, I believe. I was there to gather information, either for my own entertainment or early forms of actual research for educational reasons. That we as a global society had acquired so much information that a one-stop-shop was needed to store it all was a fascinating idea to me.
I found (and still do today) that the Information Superhighway was a road in which I could travel at my leisure as needed, a notion that I believe is well supported in the following quote taken from Bush’s “As We May Think:” “His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.”
I did not dabble in the communication features of the Internet until quite a few years later. Certainly I was aware of the existence of email and even instant messaging, but felt absolutely no need at all to try them out in my initial days of exploring the web. There was simply no reason for me to talk to someone on the computer when I could just as easily call them on the phone (an idea that has strongly been revered in my psyche by this point). Message boards (if even they were existent in those days) and chat rooms had no worth to me, as I was there to look up information, not to force my pre-adolescent opinion on that of others.
In this way I can support my claim that my initial experience reflected the ideas of Bush, and give further bearing by contrasting my experience with the ideas of Nathanial Hawthorne. Did any of my early forays give any concern to society (in this case human interaction) becoming an “invisible presence,” as noted in his “Fire-Worship?” I can answer that quite bluntly: No. No, I did not see the Internet as a threat to ways of life – specifically communication and human interaction – at that time. As noted previously, communicating over the Internet simply held no value to me at the time. Without diving into this new realm of social interaction, how could I feel that the social world around me was threatened? Had I perceived it with a broader view beyond my personal social interactions and viewed how it was affecting others, my earlier views may have reflected those of Hawthorne in some sense, yet such a notion is hardly fit for a ten-year old.
The Internet has now long held a value in my life that no amount of books or television programs or any other medium conveying information has been able to suppress. The ability and even encouragement of being able to acquire nearly whatever information I please is so incredibly valuable to me in this modern culture. Yes, there are certainly valid arguments surrounding the fact that we are distracting ourselves with baseless information that has largely no relevance to our lives. These are arguments that Hawthorne would have vigorously supported, I believe. Yet my initial foray onto the Internet was met with no concerns of such. It was an incredible emergence into a realm of information that I never dreamed possible, and have most certainly (until now) never looked back.
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