When All You Have Is the Internet, Pretty Soon Everything Starts Looking Like A Browser

This past week, Ian had a very important assignment - kind of Christmas-project-meets-homework - where he had to "print out a recipe" and bring it into class.  It was due Friday, but earlier on in the week, the lad was already agitating to go on my computer, or Mommy's, to perform this solemn mission.  Finally, sometime around Wednesday night, I got around to trying to figure out the parameters of the undertaking.  I knew we had to go print something out; I didn't understand why merely printing something out constituted a homework assignment, or what needed to be printed out.  Ian had said he encountered trouble with the interface on his last attempt, and finally I was asking what website we had to visit so that we could tackle the obstacle once and for all.

But it turned out that there wasn't any website to visit at all:  the difficulty Ian had encountered in completing this job had to do with some other program - something involving a white space, which he couldn't get past.  I asked him what the program was:  he said it was a blue-framed screen with white in the middle - like some kind of browser.

Finally I got it:  this mysterious browser turned out to be Microsoft Word.  The "printing out" of the recipe involved an additional step Ian hadn't mentioned:  typing it, in the first place, into a Word document, so that it could then be printed out and brought into school.  The task was none other than typing out, printing out, and bringing into school, a Christmas-season family recipe that would be shared with the class.  Sun Microsystems had that catchy mantra: "The network is the computer."  Ian is proof that they saw the future very clearly.  For Ian, Internet-irrelevant "office" software is a late discovery, and one with no visible impact on his vocabulary.

But with Ian, both the program and the job itself started with a different paradigm, and this informed the whole way that both the work and the software involved were described.  For Ian, and his world-wide-webbed generation, the computer - aside from being a vehicle for the occasional electronic game - is almost exclusively a window into the Internet - basically, a browser-support-system.  And people don't create things on this machine, to be printed out:  they go onto it and print things out, per se.  So of course, the closest vocabulary for talking about word processing software is the one application we all know and use every chance we get - the browser.

I still have fond memories of my father's discovery of computers in the early 90's.  When the school where he taught was about to go online, with some network access available to the teachers, he announced at home, "We're gonna be gettin' email at school."  Getting email was an elliptical way of saying "getting a browser, a modem, an Internet Service Provider," or simply "getting the Internet."

But even email was a secondary discovery for him:  his real introduction and primary purpose on typing into something that isn't a typewriter, was word processing software, so that he could type papers for his graduate program.  And it wasn't on a computer as we know it:  he  bought an awful little "word processor" - not of the Digtail DECmate variety, with a real screen and an attached printer, but basically just a typewriter with a screen on a panel above the keyboard to let you scroll a nd edit the text in electronic format before finally printing it out.   A glorified typewrite, and not a very glorious one.

And one of my first tasks helping my father with his new toy involved going into the paper that he had typed and removing all the return-carriages from his work, since he had pressed return at the end of every line of text, exactly as you would do with a typewriter.  The effect, once the addition and removal of text had been introduced, was to scatter the carriage-returns at random points on each line, like some precious hyper-modern poetry from the 1960's.

Back in the early-to-mid 90's, someone told me, helping me to put my own life into perspective, that my world would be radically different from my father's, and that my son's world would be even more different from mine than that.  I didn't particularly doubt it, but the thought blew my mind.

And now we have these diametrically-opposed instincts about computers, between my father's world and my son's world.  For my father, the computer was an extension of the typewriter.  For my son, the computer is a delivery system for the Internet - a word that came into my father's vocabulary only after he had been calling the whole network "email."  And my son doesn't even have the paradigm of typing-something-on-the-computer as an end unto itself:  the computer is where we print things, and we print things - almost exclusively -  because we get them from the Internet.

That makes me like some kind of evolutionary mutation - a freak, if you will -  between two largely internally consistent but mutually-unintelligible eras, the pre- and post-Internet/electronic ages.  The irony is that I think both Dad and Ian are pretty funny, but I somehow suspect that I'm going to turn out more of a source, than a consumer, of amusement for both generations, in the long run.

(December 12, 2012)