Even Geeks Get Old

Kareem of reemer.com remarked last week on the quick-changing nature of the digital experience among young adults:

[I]t’s hard to generalize how those in their mid-to-late 20’s interact with tech, since it came around as we were growing up. Younger generations, on the other hand, don’t know a world without the Internet…

I got a taste of that a year or two ago, when my dad (who learned his Internet at the same time as me) complained that my sister never responded to e-mail. To get her, he had to use AIM — which didn’t surprise me, knowing that she uses her profile as her main means of communication with a group she leads at school.

The real enlightening experience, though, has been watching my brother start at Tech this year. After I posted my last entry from the terminal at Hartsfield two weeks ago, I flew to Roanoke and drove to Blacksburg, where I crashed in the suite room of his dorm and met a couple of his suitemates for the first time.

One of his suite’s chief complaints with the dorm has been that VT CNS requires them to pay extra to have the Ethernet ports in their suite room activated. This is rather inconvenient when guests (like me) or classmates show up with laptops, hoping to plug in and achieve something while hanging out and watching a movie or a game. They asked me whether we’d had to deal with this when I lived in New Res East during its first year of construction (1998-99), and I felt a little old.

Why? Well, I couldn’t answer his question because it wasn’t an issue for us — almost none of us had laptops, and the few that did didn’t (a) carry them around all the time or (b) expect universal connectivity when we did. My roommate and I were overjoyed just to have Ethernet, as our freshman dorm in 1997-98 was one of the last to remain on CBX, a one-connection-per-room 11.2kbps PPP setup.

The digital world’s changed quite a bit during the seven years between our respective starts at Tech. During my freshman year, ICQ launched and AIM followed a few months later; most of us preferred the more full-featured ICQ, but had to use AIM as well to keep in touch with friends stuck on AOL accounts at home. Blogs (or LJs, or Xangas) were unknown, and I don’t remember seeing a phone number on an AIM profile until at least 2000. For that matter, the only person with a cell phone among my circle of friends was the girl who sold them at the mall back home every weekend. Those didn’t proliferate for several more years. (On a recent year’s phone list from my campus ministry it was easy to see the dividing line — class of 2003 — between the ones who were at college when cells became popular and thus had Blacksburg-local numbers, and those whose parents had bought them phones in high school and thus had area codes from all over the map.) And the worldwide text-messaging trend may finally be reaching North America with this younger generation, used to coordinating movements on the fly.

Why is all this important? Kareem, as a web developer for a rather high-traffic public site, worries about his ability to create relevant web apps for my brother’s generation. For the rest of us, it’s a context issue, as the article he quotes points out. For my brother’s age group, e-mail is for official communiqués, IM is their digital dashboard, and simplified blog-style sites are their bulletin boards. Maybe it all goes back to Marshall McLuhan after all — or maybe it’s even simpler, something we all learned as children:

Sometimes how you say something is every bit as important as what you say.

McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message” rang true when hearing my dad’s complaint about reaching my sister. The medium he chose controlled whether she ever bothered with the message, and that’s a lesson worth paying attention to.