beep beep boop boop EE-er-EE-er-schkschskch-beep! (modem noises)

Reading about Web 2.0 and thinking about the future of technology strangely makes me nostalgic about my initial experiences of computer and internet technology. I remember typing sentences into terminals in early grade school, printing them out on the old dot-matrix printers with the holey strips down the sides, and coloring them with fat crayons. I remember playing Lode Runner on my family's first computer, an Apple IIE with green font. At one point, I knew all kinds of DOS commands - I actually had to use them to run programs! In the sixth grade I took a BASIC programming class at a local community college; I believe that training in logic boosted my math comprehension and problem-solving skills for everything up through calculus and paved the way for me to understand HTML when I created a personal webpage on Angelfire in 1995. But my first introduction to getting "online" was with a plodding, noisy modem that connected our family to TinCan, a local internet provider where I had my very first email address. My dad discovered Bulletin Board Systems and we took turns dialing in to interact with other users and participate in role-playing games. We were on the cutting edge, it seemed, and I enjoyed my dad's interest and encouragement as we learned and applied the "next best thing". That adventurous spirit drives me still, and I have been sharing many of my Learning 2.0 discoveries with him during phone conversations.

Perhaps what strikes me most about the difference between those humble beginnings and this stage of my technology-life integration is how comfortable I've grown in interacting with the same people in both worlds: online and offline. After several months as a participant in that first BBS, I discovered that another user was also a student at my junior high school. We "talked" frequently through our keyboards, but when we met each other at school one day, the encounter felt so strange. Who was she, really? I wouldn't have chosen her as a friend if we had only met in person. What does that mean about our relationship? I ended up interacting with her only over the modem connection and shyly avoided her in the school.

Far cry from today, in which a majority of the Web 2.0 tools are all about social networking. In our culture it seems people have as many or more virtual relationships (business and personal) than face-to-face friends and colleagues. I would be very interested to see statistics on that.