I made a very curious discovery reflecting back on my middle school years, circa 2007.
I was a web programmer at the ripe old age of 14.
How, you ask? Am I a genius? A protégée of some sort?
The answer is no. I simply had a MySpace.
MySpace eventually allowed its users to customize their pages. I was coding at a basic, perhaps proficient level. I had no choice but to speak in Java in order to get a pretty yellow background and Tahoma, size 23 to be exact, as my header. MySpace tricked me into learning.
I found this booklet, assembled by our very own modern day heroes, aka the Google Chrome Team, to be enticing.
It got me thinking.
The booklet said this verbatim:
“The movement of many of our daily tasks online enables us to live more fully in the real world”
Does it? Because I don’t think it does.
What is really that significant about paying your bills effortlessly over the Internet instead of doing it old school, through the phone? In actuality you’ll probably just end up clicking around and spending an extra two hours surfing, probably looking at, say, I don’t know, a list of “The Best Side Boobs of the VMA’s”, instead of living your life. Seems counterintuitive to me, and harmful.
In my opinion, that doesn’t convey living more fully in the real world, despite what this handy booklet may say. My point is, the Internet is a wonderful thing. It’s constantly evolving, and we are always looking for the next best thing. And every day, it comes. Cooler. Faster.
And every year, we become more dependent on it.
The Internet can suck you in. Cloud computing, AJAX, and browse based 3-D – who’s to say no? It’s tempting and addicting. Notice that the only other profession that utilizes the word “users” when describing their customers is drug dealing.
Yes, I may have been coding at the age of 14. But the question is, why wasn’t I outside being present in my body?
I’m sure you can Google that.
-Bia Jurema