Unusually, I was in town for Labour Day weekend this year, and it seemed like nearly everywhere I went I passed roving hordes of frosh. They all look impossibly young and fresh-faced, and at some point it occurred to me that these people would have been born after the year 2000.
Naturally, this made me feel like a geezer, and sent me down memory lane regarding what my world was like when I was their age – allowing for the fact that almost no one ended up at university at age 17 back then.
I was that age when I was introduced to the internet, thanks to one of my teachers who thought I might find it interesting. A mild understatement.
At school there was one computer that had a modem in the teacher’s lounge in the library, and there wasn’t much to see besides some Freenets and such. It was slower than molasses in January, not that we knew better then. This year’s frosh won’t have known a world without broadband.
People didn’t have internets at home, y’see. Cell phones existed, but you could barely hoist one one-handed. They certainly didn’t fit in your pocket or take pictures, and no teenager had one.
If you were fortunate, your home phone was cordless, or at least had a really long curly cord (that would constantly get super tangled) so you could lock yourself in your room or a closet for those important private calls. If we had had internets at home then, we wouldn’t have been able to be online and use the phone at the same time.
Once I got to university, there were entire computer labs where you, and often your friends, could work or hang out, sometimes all night. Who would tell you it was past your bedtime? We did this sometimes even though I had my own computer (a 486).
Via text-based programs, we “met” people from all over the world. I remember when it was awkward to talk to the un-initiated about your internet friends (who you’d never met in person), trying to communicate that the relationships were as real as any other.
While I’m sure some of the people I interacted with were weirdos (there were an awful lot of Rush fans …) not once was I catfished or lured or asked to send money to to a 419 scam.
Sounds so … pure, doesn’t it? A geek playground with no doxxing, no revenge porn, no Twitter harassment, no Facebook hate groups .…
Of course, there was also no Tinder, no Netflix, no grocery or meal delivery services, no e-books, no cat videos, and no revolution or social change broadcast in real-time via social media.
Silicon Valley still made stuff. (Steve Jobs hadn’t yet returned to Apple.) The dot-com boom and bust were years away, and “freemium” wasn’t a thing. A unicorn was a mythical equine of legend, and a hockey stick was used on the ice, not as a metaphor for a tech company’s growth.
While my nieces knew how to use touch screens, like my iPhone’s, as toddlers, my generation mastered the personal home computer, the video game console, and the television remote control. Ready Player One was … pretty much us.
Now you can download iPad games for your cat, hire people on the other side of the world to earn video game loot for you, and order pizza from your table top at Graffiti Market. (Their pizza is delicious, by the way.)
We didn’t learn to program in kid-friendly languages (just BASIC) or build robots at maker camps during school holidays. We didn’t write mobile apps in our spare time or become fugitives from the FBI for our hacking adventures. But I like to think my cohort has done some interesting things in the intervening years. (We’re right in the middle, age-wise, between Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.)
But the kids whose leisure time was tech-enriched? Those frosh I’ve been seeing all over the place — I can’t wait to see what magic they make.
I handed in hand-written assignments in school. Eventually upgraded to an electric typewriter, then a word processor at some point in university. I suspect these frosh type vastly better than they can write, especially on mobile devices. (Did they even learn cursive in school?)
I had to learn how to write a proper bibliography to include with my school assignments. Citing actual books and stuff, which I looked up in a card catalogue. Software didn’t handle these things yet. There was no Google. Or Wikipedia.
But I never had to learn about dealing with online bullying, or sexting, or handling requests for topless Snapchat photos, or getting hacked. In many ways, these frosh are vastly more sophisticated than my friends and I were when we went off to university.
Granted, they’ll never know hazing (sorry: orientation) like we did, either. Probably not a bad thing, though it did make for great stories ....
There was no #metoo movement, because the hashtag wasn’t invented yet. The number of people I know victimized by sexual violence in their university years is staggering. I would like to believe that’s changed, but I know it hasn’t.
While I have a bunch of female friends and acquaintances now who are engineers and software developers and such, when I got to uni all my geek friends were dudes. I know women who were so discouraged from getting into STEM they ended up with arts degrees they didn’t really want. It makes me happy to see women in those leather University of Waterloo Engineering jackets.
I am still waiting for a world where all the women who want to get into STEM do so, and can remain there and thrive. At the same time, though, the daughters of my geek friends? They’re going to make fearsome frosh.
So, hey frosh. Welcome to adulthood and higher education. You’re going to think us old fogies are dumb and dusty and riddled with prejudices and holding you back. And you’re not wrong in a lot of ways. But you’ll learn stuff from us, too. Use our money. Aspire and scheme and collaborate to make great things. Fix stuff we broke.
Take care of each other, okay? And don’t drink cheap tequila. Trust me on this.
M-Theory is an opinion column by Melanie Baker. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Communitech. Melle can be reached @melle or me@melle.ca.
