Seriously. How did our parents survive without the Internet?

When I think about my childhood, we did not have access to the internet as often. However, we did have a dial up connection that allowed my brother and I to take turns playing on the silly websites such as Club Penguin and Webkinz. We also were obsessed with playing Solitaire and the traditional Pinball. Everyone remembers Pinball with the space theme and it took forever to load up on your computer unless you had the nicer desktop. Ah, great memories!

Anyways, when I think about all of the things I have to accomplish that are submitted through an internet connection, it baffles me that our parents used to not rely on it. As a college student, we have to submit our assignments through a site called Blackboard. We create the Word documents by ourselves and then have to upload them to our professors.

How did we get to a time that we don’t have to turn in hard copy forms of our essays or even homework assignments? I remember my last year in high school, I had a teacher that created this website that we had to upload all of our work on there so we had easy access to editing it.

We have become so reliant on technology, it is scary. While we have the opportunity to look up information by typing in a question to our neighborhood friend, Google, we also lose the capacity to read a book and scan for information. We also have access to our phones to be able to text and not have to talk on the phone.

However, we lose the interactions that make us human and cannot even have a simple dinner conversation without utilizing our phones for either texting our companion or surfing social media websites.

So, as I state again, how did our parents survive without the internet? How did they survive not being able to look up the information and have instant access? Seriously, we have articles available to us on the internet through college campuses and we can instantly find words and phrases that we are searching for.

When our parents were little, they had to use encyclopedias to figure out the information that they were searching for. They skimmed paragraphs upon paragraphs looking for the right facts for the essay they were either writing on notebook paper or typing on some other device. It just baffles me how used to technology we are.

When I think of libraries, I think of the Dewey Decimal System that we had to learn when we were in elementary school. Our parents did not have databases where the call numbers were saved on a computer and they could instantly find the call number. They had their file cabinets with the call numbers and author and title of the book on the card. My father had to take that card to the librarian in order to find the certain book they were looking for, search for the information he needed, and then write down the citation of it and continue on with his essay.

How on earth did our parents survive without recent technology? How will our minds be molded with future technology? That is also something to think about and that is scary.