A Stranger in a Strange Land

It has often been described that people of my generation are immigrants to the world of technology and members of my children’s generation are the natives. This makes sense because their world has always had technologies which we, as children, only saw in science fiction movies shown on one of the three fuzzy television channels the black and white Magnavox could tune in after the sun went down.

Like many people my age it was not the Statue of Liberty welcoming me to the new land but rather the VCR. Instead of a blazing torch held high in the sky lighting my way to freedom and prosperity the video player had a digital clock bravely blinking “12:00” into the darkness of technological ignorance. The problem was getting the darn clock to stop that.

I soon mastered the VCR. I was able to command it do irrational, possibly even unnatural, acts. Such as taping one show while I watched another. I could also be a timeshifter. This meant I could watch “Miami Vice” at eleven in the morning on a Sunday instead of all those poor folks in my technologically backward homeland who had no choice but to watch it at nine on Friday nights. I was no longer a slave to the whims of network programmers. I could watch “Cosby” AND “Magnum P.I.” even though they were opposite each other. Talk about your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to watch “Misfits of Science” any time we darn well pleased, this was the promised land.

Next I became a guide for the newcomers. I worked at a video store (known at the time as Popingo, later as Popinwent). There were many, many times I fielded a phone call from a techno immigrant who was struggling to program his VCR to do its magic for him as well. If I was unable to talk him through the process the last resort was to ask a single question. “Is there a twelve year old kid in the house? Put him on the phone.”

In the ensuing years I learned about DVD players, universal remotes, cordless phones, video games (beyond Atari), and the ultimate benchmark of a true techno devotee, the home computer. I mastered e-mail, surfing the internet and googling – a verb that sounds at once childish yet vaguely dirty. I have graduated to a point that I write blogs, watch YouTube, listen to podcasts and have even been known to occasionally wiki.

Having achieved something akin to resident alien status there are two basic phrases I use when dealing with my new homeland. The first one is used when I come across something really amazing to me, like when I got my first iPod. Even though it resembled a piece of Juicy Fruit and had no moving parts it was able to store and play, with crystal clear sound, dozens and dozens of songs. This prompted me to say, “This shouldn’t work.”

The other phrase is used when struggling to get the infernal computer to function correctly. Often I have been called to fix a problem and as the tension and blood pressure mounts the phrase my family hears shouted from the deepest recesses of the basement as I stare determinedly at the completely unsympathetic, nay, tauntingly brazen cathode ray tube is “Do what you are designed to do!” This is sometimes followed by terms best not published in a respectable newspaper.

My latest evolution as a citizen of Technovania was the purchase of an iPod Touch. This is something about the size of cassette tape (for the technology natives you’ll have to ask one of your elders what that was) which does a myriad of impossible things. I can connect to the internet via WiFi. I can download apps. It may even have Bluetooth capabilities.

Okay, I have to admit I am still an immigrant because I just used a bunch of words from a foreign tongue. I have an idea what I was saying but I could be totally wrong. Kind of like that guy who goes to France and using his high school French class from fifteen years ago as his template attempts to order roast chicken with rice and actually boasts to the waiter that his aunt’s pen in on his uncle’s chest of drawers.

I am learning how to use it even if I do not understand how it could possibly work. Of course the chief thing I use it for at the moment is playing solitaire which I could do with technology from the 9th century, playing cards.