Technology ... Has it Changed Me?

Having been born in the early 1970's, I feel as though in someways I've grown up with the personal computer. When I was in first grade, my parents bought a TRS80-III, it had a cassette player/recorder to save programs onto cassette tapes. The modem was a 300 baud modem, and everything was white text on a black screen some computers had green text on a black screen, but at the time it was fascinating. At that time, the Worm Game was being used as a teaching tool for those who wanted to learn programming, software like the infamous "Eliza" were beginning to come on the scene, and Bill Gates was rumored to have made the claim that 32bits of memory was all a computer would ever need. I spent days typing in a program from a book in order to have a new game to play. I never did get very good with actual programming, but I was able to debug a program I had typed in from a book. I think many of the games I play now really have their roots in the early games I played on the TRS80-III. I played text adventures back then, and later I was able to play Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) which were sort of a cross between the old text adventures I had played as a kid and the emerging world of chat rooms. There was a window of time where there were computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) which in some ways were the trail blazers that helped the internet grow in popularity.

I look at how I did research for essays and other papers when I was in school before the internet was widely available to the general public, and to be honest I think I might have done better in school had I been able to use the internet instead of having to compete with classmates for access to books in our school and public libraries on the subject I was researching. It never failed, I was usually late turning in essays and other papers that required researching in books in part because I couldn't get ahold of the information I needed, but also, I was the kid with tons of potential who could do better if I "just applied myself" I was born in a time when it was commonly thought that only boys could have ADHD so as a female with it, school was next to impossible at times. Technology is one thing that has held my attention though and allows me to accomplish things like writing articles, creating a website, playing games online that allow me to interact with others. I think that while face to face conversation seems to be a dying art, there are things that technology is enabling people to do that they might not otherwise be able to do. Those with visual impairments can have their computer read anything on their screen to them, someone with a hearing impairment can read subtitles or use TTY technology. I don't have to keep calling someone endlessly to try and pass along information or ask them a question if they are on the phone, I can leave them a voicemail even though they are on their phone. I think some things have gotten eaiser and less frustrating as I've watched technology progress, but other things, like letter writing, postcards, and even simply having a face to face conversation with someone those things seem to be fading away and becoming lost arts. I have met people who were tremendous story tellers they could spin a tale at the drop of a hat in a face to face conversation, but to be honest I'm meeting fewer and fewer of those folks. I think that I might have been one of them had I not been raised along side of the personal computer and taught to interact directly with machines more then people. I think that in some ways I'm better then I might have been without the technology I have available to me, but at the same time, I do find myself wondering if life truly was simpler before technology came along or if it is just a catch phrase people use? I think that technology has changed the pace at which I can acquire information, which in a sense causes me to change my views more quickly then I might have changed them without having so much information easily accessible to me, so I think it is safe to say that yes, technology has changed me but I don't really know if it has been for the better or not, I guess that depends on what aspect of my life you look at.