The Internet Generation

Well, I’m still hanging in there even though I’m not keeping up with the daily post schedule I’ve set for my self. I’ll blame it on the holidays. I’ve been getting around to see family and shopping and everything.

I was at my brother’s this weekend when I had a digital moment with my daughter. She loves computers all most as much as I do, or at least the internet. And she was copying and pasting pics from webpages into MS Word, moving them around and putting pictures in an arrangement---and she was doing it without forcing the pictures into place. She just put them anywhere she wanted to and they stayed right there---no snapping back in place by the cursor or anything. I’ve never figured out how to do that in Word, much to my frustration. I mean, I’ve always used layout software like Pagemaker and had great trials with the limitations of Word. She said, “Just click the ‘put picture behind text’ button and then you can move it anywhere. You didn’t know that? YOU? Wait a minute, let me enjoy this a second. I actually knew something about computers that my Dad didn’t”.

I knew it was true, but I had to put her in her place with a “hey now, don’t mock your elders” or something like that. Now that I think about it I think she was just trying to use that line from the movie National Treasure---but I also got to thinking that, yeah, that’s the way it should be. I want my kids to start knowing as much or more about computers than I do. I would love to have them be extensions of my digital experience---coming to me to tell me about the latest cool thing they’ve found. It’d be like having our own little users group right there in our own house.

I don’t think they may grab hold of the whole computer thing quite as eagerly and completely as I do though. I think they might only be interested in what they are interested in---and just play inside the confines of those interests, not explorering and poking around the dark corners like I enjoy doing.

I had a friend at work who was like that. Spent hours and hours online in the chatrooms and instant messaging. Not much searching on the internet beyond that. Not that she talked about anyway. And really wasn’t interested in getting under the hood of that machine she spent so much time in front of.

I tried to get my daughter interested in keeping a weblog. I thinkshe may have been a little young for it then, though. On her 11th birthday, I celebrated her ‘binary birthday’---because it was her 11th Bday, on the 10th of October, 2001 (11 on 10-10-01; all ‘1’s and ‘0’s, get it?). I got her a domain name and a hosting service so it wouldn’t just be on a weblog site. I taught her a little HTML and she built a simple little site.

It was a good conversation piece, but she didn’t really get into updating it much. Once about every 6 or 8 weeks. And then it was usually just the response page for some online quiz thing, like “what kind of fairy are you” or something like that. So in the end we dropped it.

But it isn’t a totally lost cause. She does enjoy email, with her friends. And Chat. And we all enjoy Homestarrunner.com. Perhaps as she gets older and her friends get all interested in weblogs and webpages, she might get back to it.

We’re going to be moving my computer out of the basement soon (where I have a makeshift office space), and making it into the family computer. I think that all the kids will get a little more time to explore when that happens. That’ll be cool, I think, to see what blossoms then.