Ah, the irony. We were interviewing a candidate for a job today. She said how fortunate she had been to have come of age just as the internet (yes, she said, “internet” – not “web” was “created”—IM when she was 13 (about a decade ago by my estimate of her current age), and then Facebook when she hit college (that would be 2003, according to her resume).
I bit my tongue. I had been using AOL Instant Messenger just a bit earlier in her life, and IRC for quite a while…. And then I double-bit my tongue, because I have always regarded myself as being part of the blessed generation for whom microcomputers were just becoming available around the time that I was ready for them, and then there was the magic of constructing workable addresses node by node, and the the FIDO BBS network and Usenet, and my goodness, that whole gatecrash thing when AOL and CompuServe hit the internet….
Then I started thinking back and remembering my father trying to explain time-sharing terminals to me, “the latest thing,” back when we would drive down to MIT on the weekend for him to run his punchcarded programs (and me, the pre-teen, to play with the colorful punch cards). I remember as a young adult when I built the first MS-DOC machine for my father and he emailed me back how advanced operating systems had become and did I have a Fortran compiler that he could use?
It is true that for kids my son’s ages (this job candidate being among them), they are the first generation whose play is largely on the web, and this whole “web 2.0” thing is, in many ways, an expression of them starting to play with the web in ways that make sense to them, as people who have been chatting with each other with IM tools since they were old enough to get computers.
Years ago, under the illusion that my future lay in technology, I took some basic electronics classes. Several people in the class were already writing games in Apple BASIC. “What’s the next big thing?” we asked one day. “Networking,” he said. “Once people get used to computers, they’re going to use them to connect to each other.”
He was right. Computers haven’t gotten in the way of our face-to-face meetings (except insofar as they help us juggle our over-committed lives better). It makes me want to hire this young twenty-something who became an adolescent just as the internet “came of age,” if only to see what new ideas she comes up with next.
