Geocities, Hotmail, IRC, MySpace, AskJeeves, MSN, Internet Cafes, Limewire, Napster, eBay, Amazon – but mostly books, ‘Kewl’ not ‘cool’ A/S/L? AOL and AIM, and manually having to type ‘www’ in front of every address – does anything on this list conjure a memory for you?
Maybe it’s the impending holiday season, or the looming new year but this little window in the second week of December often makes me feel nostalgic, and when it’s zero-dark thirty, the lo-fi tunes are on, and the lights are low – sentimental. Not in a melancholic way, but rather in a warm-smile-at-the-moments-because-they-happened-type manner.
Let’s focus on the nostalgia tonight, because so much of my reflection lately has been technology based.
When I was at school I recall the first iMac’s G3’s and then ibooks arriving into our newly created computer lab, colourful beacons that looked like the future. Our stuffy Catholic school forebode any student to touch them outside of computer class – and even in computer class, we were to sit without touching the keyboard until instructed to do so. We were taught to type using the iconic and sometimes maligned ‘Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!’ software, and the truth is I still don’t have a strict touch typing technique, I’m a hybrid. You see, by the time we had baptised our Mac’s at St Stuffies, I was already typing at home on our computer.
For reasons which don’t quite make sense for my non-technical and non-early adopter parents (we only convinced my Dad to forgo his flip phone for an iphone 3 years ago…..) they decided to invest in a computer early – making my younger sibling and I among the first in our classes to have a computer. Luckily for me; my bedroom was closest to the phone line, so I was able to house the new technology just metres from my bed. The dial-up cable snaked across the hallway, connecting the phone line to the hard-drive, and in doing so, connected me to the world.
As many will attest, the sound of a dial-up modem will either feel like nails on a chalk board or like something wonderous. For me, it was the latter. A comforting sound that felt like infinite possibility. Those screeches and stuttered crackles with the lag and wait before finally…..finally….the World Wide Web was at your fingertips was magical and it stirs something in me now just thinking about it.
Google was the wild west though, a seemingly innocuous search term to lead to many NSFW results – if my parents knew what was sometimes seen no doubt they would’ve literally pulled the plug.
In this period of life, the internet was a luxury. Our lives weren’t dictated to by the ability or inability to ‘get online’ or load or use a sepcific app or function. There wasn’t an addictive nature to it, at least not for me in my formative years, instead it felt intentional. You woud patiently wait for the dial-up to sing it’s song, then you’d be online free to ‘surf’ or connect via message apps. Then, imagine this in 2024, once you were done – you logged off. Like closing a book for the night, you would end your experience there.
Here’s the thing though, at the time I never thought to learn how to program. I knew a guy in my class who was ‘good with computers and maths’ and did that ‘coding stuff’ but it wasn’t a thing which was considered for my peer or friends group, and certainly, it pains me to say – not on the horizon for women. We were still expected to show up to home economics class and nail the scone recipe.
I wish. My goodness I wish I had exposure to someone at the time who said ‘try this’ and I wish, I had the confidence to try it, but the reality is, neither of those things is true. So we come full circle, and as I prepare to enter the fourth decade of my life next year, I’m finally learning to code and developing the skills I probably would’ve excelled at given my innate curiosity. It sounds trite, but things do happen for a reason.
Now, when young women ask me for life advice I don’t give specifics, because everyone’s journey is different, but the lesson from the internet was an experiment in curiosity – and that is among the greatest gift we can give to the next generation – to remind them to stay curious and to lean in when something intrigues you, because you never know where the cables lead.
Seeline CYBER 
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