Of course I remember life before the internet!

As a kid playing outside in the yard, I had a pretty vivid imagination. I don’t remember the specifics of what I imagined, but I do recall mixing potions, that one specific tree was my house, and a tree stump was a friend’s house. I could spend a lot of time outside, alone, just entertaining myself and at the same time learning about the world.

Still, even with my vivid childhood imagination, I don’t think that I could have ever imagined a future in which the internet was a thing.

Even in high school, when I first heard about the internet, I don’t think I really understood what it was. I was on the school newspaper. I remember many late nights at the printers where we had to bring printed copies of the paper and lay them all out by hand. Of course, we had computers and software to lay it out (maybe abode?), but the final print and review had to be done by hand. Sometimes this meant that if we found a mistake very late in the process, we’d have to figure out a way to correct it with the pages we had with us and an exacto knife. Sometimes we were there until 2 or 3 in the morning. In retrospect, it was pure folly on my part that I put that much time and energy into it.

Later on, in college, I remember we had a class in which we made a website. I still didn’t quite understand what I was doing or what it would mean. I just remember a least one instructor being quite excited about the potential of the internet for education. As I was creating this webpage, though, the way I understood it was just an alternative way to feed students information. And that the consumption of that information was rather passive.

Of course, today, I’m sitting at my computer at this very moment creating, as it were, content for passive consumption. But what I’m thinking about now is that I’m not creating this content and engaging in this process for students to consume and learn from. This is for me. And, for me, it’s not passive at all.

My kids, of course, have a completely different relationship to the internet. They’ve never not had it. I look at how technology is used in education now and I think to myself that even if I wanted to get back into teaching, I’d never be able to catch up.

And that just is part of my ambivalent relationship with the internet. Just this morning, I was feeling really fatigued. I thought that maybe it was I was still feeling the effects of radiation treatment. So I ended up googling a bit. Regrettably. Because of course, it’s just going to be confirmation bias. Because of course people still get fatigued a month after finishing radiation. It’s regrettable because I wish I had just listened to my own body, taken a minute or two to think about what I’ve been going through recently and then just laid down to rest.

Sometimes I look up directions to places that I’ve been dozens or even hundreds of times. I just don’t trust my own sense of space and direction anymore.

And that’s a part of my current relationship with the internet right now — I allow it to do a good chunk of my thinking for me. And the result is that I don’t use those parts of my brain enough — my mental maps, my ability to check in with and understand what’s going on with my body, my feeling of competency and confidence in my own knowledge. Those are just a couple of examples.

So, yes, I remember life before the internet. I’m grateful that that, in a world where the internet is not a constant presence, that pre-internet life is still part of me.

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