Quite often I receive an invitation to sign up with a social media site as a means of keeping in touch with friends and family or vocational colleagues. It used to be invitations to MySpace, but that one has seemingly lost out to others like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Oh, I'm about to forget about Twitter. So far I have been very hesitant to join the chorus of social media devotees, but ever so often I wonder if I need to rethink my reluctance. From time to time, I think I may be missing out on something good, or that I am just being an old fogey and stubborn about changing old habits and old-fashioned ways.
I'm coming, however, from a decades-long experience of trying to grow and develop with some of the new technologies as they have appeared since the 1970s and 1980s. One of those developments was the appearance of personal computers. By 1980, I was seeing the possibilities in computers for such things as writing, financial record-keeping and processing lists of data like long address lists, printing mailing labels on a large scale and so on. In 1984, I was encouraged by one of my church members, who was a high school teacher, to enroll in an introductory computer course being offered at Searcy High School in Searcy, Ark. I signed up for that course and thoroughly enjoyed it. I had no computer equipment at home at the time, so I was entirely dependent on the school's classroom computers. At that time, they were equipped with Radio Shack TRS-80 computers. The storage drives on those computers were two 5 1/4-inch floppy drives, which at the time were pretty much state of the art for personal computers. The course was focused on the basic computer programming language. In those days, there were not very many software programs available to buy, and people often created their own programs to get done the tasks they needed to do.
At the time, my family and I were customers of the Montgomery and Ward catalog order store, which was a carry-over from the old Montgomery & Ward mail-order catalog from my days as a boy at home. Montgomery Ward was selling Commodore computers, and my first venture into the world of computers was a Commodore 64. It could use a small TV as an output screen, so I used a little TV we had on hand. I bought a cassette tape drive for storage, and also a floppy disk drive, a printer. The salesman even talked me into a modem for data communication over the telephone. I thought I was right up there with the high technology at the time. Although we had begun hearing of electronic mail, later to be called e-mail, many of us were thinking we would never need it, and I never even tried to use my Commodore modem. It would be 1996 before I took the plunge and became an e-mailer.
In the meantime, I had become a pretty good Commodore basic programmer, with an effective word processing program for writing letters, bulletins, newsletters and a database program for handling financial records, reports and mass mailings. I even got into machine language programming with all the 1s and 0s and base 8 numbers. But by the 1990s, the Commodore company was losing out to other competitors. Dozens of companies were selling IBM-compatible clone computers with the new MS-DOS operating system and a new thing called Windows. I was quickly becoming obsolete in sticking with Commodore. So, in 1993 a friend pointed me to my first IBM-compatible computer, made by NEC company. I paid $300 for it as a second-hand rebuilt machine. It had a 5 1/4-inch floppy drive, a new 3 1/2-inch floppy drive and a 40-megabyte hard drive. I was thinking that now I'm really advanced, really caught up with new electronic technologies!
Of course, these days, in 2014, almost nobody uses floppy drives any more, and ordinary hard drives those days have thousands of times more storage capacity than my old 1990s hard drive. That was my second time to become obsolete, despite having made a dedicated effort to advance with the times and technologies. I had gained considerable expertise in using MS-DOS, but Microsoft Windows would pretty much replace the older leading operating system in 1995. It has often seemed, through the years, that we don't really "keep up." Instead, we are just always having to start over with new things.
Having become obsolete in my advanced high technologies at least four times, maybe five, I have become slower about embracing all the new things. I started out in 1984 thinking, I'll start with Commodore computers, then learn about Apple computers, then the IBMs and others. I soon found out that one never learns even one of them thoroughly. So now, these days, we have laptops, palm computers, smart phones (which are computers), tablets, iPhones and Kindles, and someone has come up with a new computer that works through your eyeglasses! And I'm looking at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube. Is there any way a person can keep up with all those? Even though I am a rather reserved and quiet person, my intention is to be a sociable person.
When we can't keep up with all the social media, and can't predict which of them will endure and which will soon pass, can't we still be sociable in today's world?
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community on 02/26/2014