Hurry Up and Wait

To be completely honest I don’t really remember my first actual encounter with the internet. All I can remember about it was that I was in middle school, maybe 6th or 7th grade, and we had a very slow dial-up connection from a company called CompuServe. I also remember the computer we had at the time was a Gateway and it was a pretty decent machine. I remember not being able to be on the internet for very long because it took up the only phone line we had and my parents didn’t want to miss any important calls. I mainly used it for emailing back and forth with a close friend who moved across country, since it was faster than regular mail. I also remember being at friends houses who had AOL and who were able to spend more time on the internet playing games and chatting away with other people, I was so jealous! I remember creating an email account through Yahoo! and thinking it was the coolest thing. I still have that angel_katy91888 account because I use it for things online that ask for my email in order to sign up for something or view something and I don’t want the site to clog my school email account. I would say that my attitude at that point was fairly indifferent to the internet, but that changed as soon as my dad got rid of the CompuServe dial-up deal and got wireless internet service.
Once we switched to the faster, easier to navigate internet I was hooked! My sister and I downloaded AOL Instant Messenger and would chat with our friends and download tons of music and essentially “clog up the computer,” according to my dad. We would also just spend hours late at night creating accounts with different websites like MySpace and Kiwibox and play games or just search random things. We would do this late at night because we were still not able to use the computer for anything other than school until homework was done or my dad was done with whatever he was doing (because we only had one central, family, computer).
I would say that initially my encounter with the internet was more like the realization of Vannevar Bush’s dream of the memex because it was so exciting and new and I couldn’t use it enough or couldn’t wait to see what else was out there. But now, looking back on the whole experience and thinking about the present and future of the internet, I see it as more of a threat to social and domestic life; just as Hawthorne saw the wood stove. If I hadn’t been so adamant about chatting with my friends over email or instant messenger (most of whom I would just see at school the next day anyway), I might have spent more time with my family or have done something more productive with my time.
I most definitely found myself agreeing with Hawthorne when he says “Truly may it be said, that the world looks darker for it. In one way or another, here and there, and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life.” Even though he was basing all of this off of the invention of the wood stove, he knew that it would only get worse from there. This invention made it ok for people to not sit around a central location to get warm and talk, they were free to be off doing whatever they pleased in other areas of the house. Indeed it did get worse from there. I remember my mom making specified family dinner nights back when I was in middle school and high school, because we were all constantly go, go, go all week long. We had dinner together every Sunday night to try to catch up with one another about the past week’s events and anything that was coming up in the next week. Even though we had dinner together once a week it was never enough to slow down and actually talk about things. Looking back, I would rather have spent more time hanging out with my family than chatting with friends or playing stupid games online.