The Internet Through The Eyes of a 12-Year Old Boy/22-Year Old Boy

                 In my younger years, I was a computer serial killer.  My penchant for downloading music illegally through LimeWire and Kazaa has put down several family desktop computers.  And, while my wisdom has grown in the area of not blowing up a computer, I still have chills and fears when I click on torrents for more illegally downloaded music now that the PC I’m putting at risk is my own.  But the allowing of Trojans and spyware and other malicious software onto my parents’ computers throughout my adolescent life was part of the first memories I had of the internet. 

                So far in this class, I have railed that my generation is the last to be privileged (or subjugated some might argue) to a world without the World Wide Web.  But I truly am of the last generation who lived before the internet was a monster gear turning the machine that is the world.  I remember days before my family even had a computer, and even then, we did not dial into the internet until 1998.  My earliest memory of computers was probably playing Wheel of Fortune via MS-DOS on my cousin’s computer or my very first game of solitaire, back when that was the only real form of entertainment via early Windows systems.  But when my parents decided to transform the old dry cleaners that had been in my family for nearly 60 years into an old-time soda shop, the need to hook up to the internet became apparent.  And my 10 year old world changed, just like many others my age. 
                We bought a Compaq desktop computer.  I cannot remember for the life of me the model or any of its specs.  It was a wonderfully low tech piece of machinery compared to today.  But it could play computers games like Riven and Myst with little difficulty so I was not too upset at the thing.  I did not know that it could get better.  My mother bought a subscription to Mindspring’s dial up service (We now know Mindspring as Earthlink).  We bought a second phone line that connected to a phone sitting in the kitchen of our soda shop and would yell and scratch over the line when someone picked up the phone while connected.  It was a horrible sound.  Almost as bad as the sound of dialing up in the first place.  I was always reminded of the old image of nails scratching against chalkboard as the signals bounced back and forth at each other trying to connect to the internet.  But honestly, the dial up noise may be worse.  The welcoming silence of the internet today almost scared the hell out of me the first time I logged on to find nothing happened in the sound department. 
                I was obsessed with music at an early age.  Part of it was making music; part of it was listening to music.  So the obvious choice of what to do with the internet became finding as much music as possible for as little work as possible.  Napster, by this time, had been forced into a pay service and torrents were still a few years off.  File sharing softwares like Kazaa and LimeWire were my only means of conveyance throughout the internet’s black market.  And, while I gained a vast bounty of albums and musicians I had never heard of, or had heard bits of and wanted more, Kazaa and LimeWire slowly got their payment from me.  By 2006, my family had been through three separate computers.  Kazaa killed the original Compaq desktop, and LimeWire finished off the next two E-Machines PCs.  I have learned from my mistakes now and am much more careful about the places I tread in the World Wide Web.  But I still remember those early days of waiting as kilobytes per second poured into my Compaq PC like sand dripping out of the top of an hourglass.
                Thinking about kids today, I am amazed at how easily I transform into a crotchety old man at the thought of cell phones and iPods in the hands of children, children who are well beyond adepts at using these devices.  I truly am reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s essay “Fire-Worship” in the sense that reading his article almost seemed nonsensical to me at the time.  A wood stove being seen as a powerful yet sinister device of technological advancement seemed ridiculous and farfetched from my vantage point this far into the future.  But now where I stand, looking at children who will live their entire lives knowing the internet and the nearly light speed advancement of technology, I find myself in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s place.  The poetry of the world was not in the least snuffed out when the wood stove came along.  However, with such towering progress in digital technology in the past few decades, what Hawthorne feared may, in fact, come to fruition.  Where is the beauty in a computer?  Where is nature in the internet?  Zeroes and ones are not poetic, but instead cold and lifeless.  When my generation is long dead, who will stop and say, “Remember watching videos on television and only television?”  No one, I fear.  The old guard will change some day, and when that day comes, I pray they don’t look down upon us for having lived without the internet.  Because before the internet, we at least knew what life was like without instant information gratification. And that is something that keeps us at least humbled by the power and reach of the internet.  Something, these young hooligans know nothing about.