A Tangent

A friend of mine posted a picture from high school on Facebook that I stumbled across recently. She was holding a "cell phone" in the picture and it was a gigantic cream colored rectangle that covered the whole side of her head and had a long extended antennae that went out of the frame. At first I giggled because it looked like a joke...and then I realized that it wasn't. It gave me pause. Life doesn't seem that much different now (shoulder pads and high top Reeboks excluded) until you take a minute and think on it. When I was a senior in high school, a very few people had "car phones" that were mounted and plugged into the car. They hardly ever worked and they were for emergency use only, as they were astronomically expensive to call on. And those were just the super rich kids. :-) Our big thing was a "pager". Once you were paged, you had to get to a phone to return the calls. That seems like a very foggy memory to me, but it happened none the less. Our parents had absolutely no way of knowing where we really were. All of those keg parties out in a pasture with half the school in attendance...yep, we were spending the night with our friends. ;-) If you told friends where you were going, you had to actually show up as planned because there was no way to reach them once they left their house, except for the errant page. I remember the endless slumber parties at my house full of "prank calling" every cute boy in the directory...nobody had caller id at the time. I can vividly recall being at my friend Robbie's house in the 10th grade and him showing me the "Internet" for the very first time in real life. It was so strange and foreign that I actually remember the moment. I thought it was amazing. I remember spending literally hours at the computer lab in college so that I could play with email and look things up online. There was no wireless and nobody had dial-up at our apartments or dorms. We had to go online at school. I am only 33 years old, yet things have changed so much already. I made fun of my parents almost every day of my childhood for their stories about how life was in "their day" and how things were so much different. I suppose that is inevitable of each generation. I am sure that Colin will have things in his life that I can't even imagine right now. That picture of the giant phone brought all these thoughts to the forefront of my mind.

The use of social media, like Facebook, has been the latest change to my everyday life. I am now in touch with hundreds of people, and the number grows daily, that I would not have a clue about right now otherwise. I love that I can post pictures and funny stories about Colin and my entire family spread across the country has immediate access to it all. I love the constant access to friends and family and how I can wonder where to get a good birthday cake in one minute and have 20 answers from local friends in the next. I love that I can see pictures of the children of childhood friends and that I know who married who without having to go to a reunion. :-) It is just good fun for me, but I am an adult and never knew media like this as a child. It makes me wonder how much harder the teenage years will be for Colin than they were for me. The 6th and 7th grade were the absolute worst days of my life...and I was bullied around simply because I was very small for my age. The constant torment of my peers at that time was seemingly impossible to bear. I consider myself lucky because I managed to shake it off and enjoy high school as a popular and well-liked girl. Lots of kids are not so lucky and are tormented throughout their teenage years. When I think about those hard years, it makes me wonder how very much worse it all would have been if there had been a "Facebook" at the time. My husband was recently "friended" by a very young cousin and we were blown away by the peek into her world. There was a big feud going on and the things being written back and forth on their "walls" were literally mind blowing. To see such horrible comments written down for the world to see took my breath away...these are 12 year olds! I have seen the news and know all about this trend, but seeing it in person and happening to someone in real time really shook me up. I have several years before Colin is into this stage, but I can say without a doubt that I will be very much in his business and will be completely in charge of his use of every bit of new technology on the market. Even if I have to take classes to understand all of it! :-) All I could think as I read through that Facebook wall of trash was "WHERE IN THE HELL ARE YOUR PARENTS?!". It is going to take a lot of work to protect our children in this new and improved world. A lot!

Okay, I am stepping down off my very random soap box. I am telling you...seeing that "Zach phone" in the picture of my friends really pushed me over the edge! (obscure Saved By the Bell reference included!) ;-)