<p>How would Facebook, Internet forums, etc have shaped your personality and life experiences? What would be different? What would stay the same? Would you prefer to have grown up then or now?</p>
<p>I’m 17. I was talking to my 29-year-old brother about this and I think a lot of the reasons him and I are different come down to me having the Internet, and him growing up in a time when everyone online was a geek.</p>
<p>I grew up in a remote rural area. It would have been wonderful to have the Internet. </p>
<p>(I loved using usenet newsgroups when they first became available, but that wasn’t til after I had moved to a city.)</p>
<p>I wouldn’t have had to go to the library and fill out a piece of paper every time I wanted to get a non-current issue newspaper or magazine. </p>
<p>When I asked my Dad a question, and he invariably answered “look it up”, I would have had more resources than the World Book and a 1942 version of the Encyclopedia Britannica.</p>
<p>Heck just having a computer, and word processing software, Word, would have have been awesome. Need a synonym, right click and you have it. We had to ‘look it up’</p>
<p>I had a citizens’ band radio, so at least I got to talk to some people.</p>
<p>I would maybe still be in touch with friends from high school because of social networking - heck, even college friends. I don’t stay in touch with any of them.</p>
<p>I would have been a member of some Donny Osmond message board and probably still be on it - he’s still cute!!! :)</p>
<p>I would perhaps have diagnosed my mom’s heart failure instead of relying on the doctor’s diagnosis of stress.<br>
I would have been even more upset at being “dumped” when seeing how quickly the relationship status on facebook changed.
Think I would have had a career in computing rather than just typing on one.</p>
<p>I would never have fallen in love with libraries.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if I had grown up in a computerized world, I would never have learned to type. I mean REALLY type – like on a typewriter, where accuracy is paramount because it’s impossible to correct an error without having the correction be detectable.</p>
<p>Real typing: a lost art.</p>
<p>We really didn’t have much money. If we’d had a computer at all, it would have been bought once and never replaced. Don’t know if we could have afforded internet access…maybe dial up? Might have made me feel like an outsider because instead of everyone going to the libary, I would be the only one.</p>
<p>Oh…I would have been in heaven! I love to research! I would have been so up to date on current events. My family didn’t have a lot of money: six kids, single mom. I think I would have been a better student since we couldn’t afford Newsweek and Time or newspapers.</p>
<p>sueinphilly, we had the 1941 Brittanica! Stopped in the middle of WW2… I’d hate to trade my childhood for anything. I spent blissful days riding horses, creating cities in my backyard, collecting goat bones from the hills, swimming in the Indian Ocean, collecting shells, identifying colorful African birds. It would have been a shame if the Internet had taken away from all that.</p>
<p>I would be very fat from inactivity. I was a very active child, never sat still. I was extremely skinny.</p>
<p>You lucky people with the Britannicas- we didn’t even have World Book. We had the Funk and Wagnells via grocery store weekly offers- it was horrible and stored in two narrow storage compartments meant for LP’s (those were large records…), to get to some books you had to pull out most of the others, it was fine print, few B&W pictures. </p>
<p>Son has checked out tons of books, even in college, despite his heavy computer usage. We use the computer to get library holds, H finds out about new books and asks the library to buy them! I would have been far less bored summers.</p>
<p>College applications, information gathering- just from their websites alone would have been wonderful. You had to mail in a request for a college catalog, as well as all materials.</p>
<p>Shopping for cars, appliances, hotel rooms, vacation planning, reviews of products. Checking for flight delays, news from son’s college town, apts…</p>
<p>E-mail uses the internet- I could have kept up with friends. No confusion about plans- parents could have specified pick up times… Photos sent.</p>
<p>No last minute trips to the library before it closed for resources. Hey, I would have been happy just to use a computer for word processsing. I would have learned to type instead of resisting it to avoid the girl=secretary stereotype. </p>
<p>It would have been wonderful, especially in January, to not have to go from opposite ends of campus to pick up and return registration forms, with stops at all of the course buildings in between. Think of all of the internal info your college, profs send you or have available to you.</p>
<p>Online payments, parents could instantly add money to your campus account (if they had any). No need to go the local bank location to cash a check.</p>
<p>My father won’t have a computer, son won’t teach me what he’s learned so we still can’t use it to the max. It would be so nice to send my Dad photos when events are current instead of trying to describe some things or wait for the film roll to be done and processed.</p>
<p>I would have had to share a family computer with siblings- that would have changed the fights… Wouldn’t have changed my activity levels, but sure would have enriched my brain.</p>
<p>We lived in 5 countries over 5 years when I was a teen. I would have been able to keep in close contact with my friends if we’d had things like Facebook. Alas, aerograms were my best friend!</p>
<p>I’ll be honest–I would probably never have gotten anything done at all! But there wouldn’t have been a literary or historical allusion in any of my books that escaped me.</p>
<p>On the one hand, I would have really valued Facebook as a way to keep in better touch with friends – particularly high school and college friends after graduation. Letter writing took too long and phone calls were too expensive. And email and Facebook and Skype would have certainly helped when my husband and I lived apart and only saw each other every other weekend. </p>
<p>But I would have hated Facebook in middle school and high school. All the bullying and silly games that happened at school would have happened online, and I would have been miserable. I had pretty low self esteem back in those days, and being able to measure how many “friends” I had compared to other people, and know how many “events” I wasn’t being invited to, could have been bad.</p>
<p>There were a lot of things learned when I grew up that kids today don’t have to do or take for granted. I recall that it was fairly difficult teaching history to our kids because it was so hard for them to see how few things people had even in the last century compared to what they have today.</p>
<p>For all of our technology (and it is wonderful), there’s still a lot about being human that is very hard to get across to those that have grown up with far more than what we’ve had historically. The credit bubble is one of those things. If you lived through one, you would have a hard time understanding the last two decades where people loaded up on debt that was far more than their income could support. People have an expectation that the stock market will return a certain percentage amount over the long-term. Unfortunately, their historical basis may be too short.</p>
<p>Do a lot of families still play Monopoly or Scrabble or Chess for entertainment?</p>
<p>I like all the stuff available but there is something to be said for doing things the hard way or the old-fashioned way without all of the technology.</p>