I was having an online chat with the adult daughter of an old college friend today. I told her she needed to convince her Mom to get on Facebook, so that she could be more connected to me and to many other of our old friends from school. And her daughter said "Yeah, well, you know Mom. She likes to stay away from computers and all that other techie-type stuff!". And I laughed!
I personally am joined at the hip with my computer. I have been on these infernal machines almost daily for about 25 years. Even before THAT, I had some experience, seeing as my father was a budding computer geek as early as in 1979, well before the home PC.
Of course, I was one of the first classes at my alma mater, Virginia Tech, to be required to own a PC for Engineering school. And Virginia Tech was among the first schools in the country to require this. The IBM PC I bought for my freshman year had no operating system installed. You had to install DOS yourself! It had a fold-away keyboard, and an 8" (diagonally measured) monochrome screen. Even though it was considered "portable", it weighed in at 47 pounds. My math co-processor was a special-order feature. The machine had a total memory less than a modern-day TI scientific calculator.
It was my pride and joy!
And when I think back to my friend's education at Virginia Tech, it was very different from mine. Even though she was in Architecture school, and had to take Statics and various other Engineering Fundamentals classes, she never was required to use a computer. What little exposure she DID have, was probably limited to those old clunky Computer Aided Drawing programs we had back then... You know, the ones that took you twice as long to create a drawing in than it would free-hand, and then when you printed it out something was always horribly wrong?
No wonder that she should shy away from a computer!
And still, this is the 21st Century. There is something terribly quaint about not "plugging in" daily to a computer, much less the Internet. My friend, you see, prefers actual face-to-face interaction with real live people, to chatting online. And she gets her news the old-fashioned way. She READS it. Like, in a newspaper!
While it might make it harder to communicate with her, I actually admire her for her choice. This is a terribly capable lady who can fix just about anything mechanical you could throw at her. She is highly educated. And she has raised (and for the most part home-schooled) six children. There isn't much she isn't good at, this friend.
And yet she still refuses to give in to the instant gratification of Internet news and online chat. She can entertain herself quite well, thank you very much, without spending 4 hours a day on FaceBook or playing a silly online game. She knows how to find the information she needs without the World Wide Web. And when you manage to track her down to have a conversation, you get the added benefit of actually hearing her lovely, lilting voice.
I'd like to see email replace THAT!
So, YOU GO GIRL! You keep having your conversations the right way, being able to laugh without the use of acronyms and not having to explain yourself for a lack of "tone of voice"! You keep reading books! You spend your "free time" doing the things that are important -- like getting out of the house to see the sun shining, interacting with people you can actually SEE, and raising your amazing children with honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned parental attention!
I think we could all stand to take a page from her book.
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