Here's me circa soph year, looking sheepish as I am caught aiming some one instead of working on my finals.
On the radio, driving back from work, Steve and the new girl on 97ZOK were commenting on the greatest time-sucking invention ever: Facebook. And I gots to agree, basically for the last three years of my life, every time I sign onto my computer, Facebook is one of my first stops. Waay more so in college. I'd fb stalking (ya know, scrolling through the profiles of people you only vaguely know) and be chatting it up instead of doing my homework.
And it got me thinking: How did we get along without the world wide web? I'm the .5 generation when it comes to the Internet. It's been around most of my life by this point, but I still had to learn to do things manually. Can you believe Eisenhower Middle School still taught keyboarding on the typewriter in what 99? That's a joke. It was almost the millennium. But now, I don't know how to use at all. At work, Maria asked me to use a typewriter and I just couldn't handle the task.
School must have been so much harder. I nicknamed the Stacks at the Undergrad "Rape Central" bc that old school book cataloguing system was large, unlit, and creepy. As much as I do enjoy reading, 90% of all the research I've done in my college career was online. And man, registering for classes must have been a drag. When I see the process in '90s films, the standing in line all day just to get locked out of classes, it just looks ridiculous.
What would college have been without the Internet? Without AIM? Without FB? Without even those stupid chain letters on MySpace? Without Illinois Compass/Blackboard so we could have discussions online? Without LexisNexis and J-Stor, so-we wouldn't have to look through hundreds of academic journals by hand? I suppose we'd have less time. We'd probably talk a lot more, face to face... Or maybe not. Maybe we'd just forgo leaving our rooms to make plans and instead, continue to be stuck to the TV. Who can say? All I know is, it woulda been completely different. But I wouldn't trade my and my roommates' Wikipedia-ing while watching TV for anything.
Now, the first generation to be raised totally online, they're going to be some entitled kids. But they'll also be super-self sufficient. Only crazy old people (basically my parent's generation) are going to head into banks asking for the balances and interim statements. E'rything's gonna be online. The future's going to be interesting.
