ONE day about two weeks ago, I came to the dark realization that technology will someday leave me behind.
I came to this understanding thanks to a dancing game.
The problem, I think, dates back to when I was eight.
My first real exposure to computers was in Grade 2, when our school installed a mid-'80s-era IBM desktop on a table in our classroom that had formerly been reserved for things that were actually fun.
The machine consisted of a green vacuum-tube monitor connected to a separate floppy drive and a whirring box with the size, weight and computing power of a mini-fridge.
On the day it arrived, our teacher explained to us that each student would get to "play" on it for 30 minutes a week. It was the worst 30 minutes ever.
Most of that time was spent turning the computer on and then watching it scroll through line after line of code as it and slowly came to the realization that: a) It was a computer, and b) It had no idea what the hell was going on.
At that point, it would generally ask an inscrutable question such as: "C: \> __". The answer to which, for an eight-year-old, wasn't immediately obvious.
From our teacher, we came to understand that by "C: \>_", it meant it wanted us to load Logo Writer, a piece of software popular in the 1980s that used geometry and some basic principles of coding to teach children how to hate computers.
Basically, you would enter a long and complex series of numerical instructions on how to draw a particular geometric shape you had in mind, and a cursor shaped, aptly, like a turtle, would very slowly not do that at all. It was difficult and boring and infuriating.
My absolute greatest achievement in that program, and I remember this vividly, was to create - no joke - two circles joined by a line, which I proudly told everyone was not accidental and was totally a pair of glasses.
Even in that moment of glory, though, my eightyear-old self harboured secret doubts. Was the ability to draw glasses in the time it takes most people to paint a house really a huge leap forward for humanity? I think those early years shaped my relationship to technology ever since.
By the time I finished high school in 1996, things had improved to a degree: computers were in colour and America's military leaders, needing a more efficient way to send each other kitten videos, had invented the Internet.
The World Wide Web, as many of you will recall, was still in a pretty sorry state.
Connections were dial-up, search engines were still terrible at finding key items, such as everything, and no one could pirate anything without forcibly boarding a container ship.
I say all this to make this point: When I was growing up and my brain was at its
squishiest, computers were still terrible, a fact which has left me with a subtly incomplete skill set. I do OK, but this background handicapped me in a way that people who followed just a few years later simply aren't.
This problem was thrown into sharp relief two weeks ago when some friends of mine invited me to their place to play a video game that - get this - had no controller.
For those of you who haven't been paying attention, about a year ago, Microsoft came out with this motion-sensing attachment for their gaming console that can read body movements - meaning that to navigate it, you basically stand in front of your TV and flail. It was my first time trying this thing, and while my marginally younger friends took to it naturally, I just couldn't get it.
"Hey everybody, I'm on the screen! Look, I'm waving! Wait. Where did I go? Why am I in the menu? How do I- Where did the menu go? Why is it in Spanish?"
As my frustration grew, I glanced around to see my hosts looking at me with that mixture of pity and amusement one usually reserves for watching a dog bark at a mirror.
The experience disturbed me. How had this happened? I was only four years older than they were. Suddenly I'm the angry old guy at the supermarket who still doesn't get debit terminals.
Was I born too soon? Will the gap continue to widen? What will it be like when I have kids, or when they have kids?
"Mom, grandpa's trapped in the holoroom." "Mom, grandpa swallowed his miniphone." "Mom, grandpa said Googletron shouldn't rule us."
I don't know. I guess my response will be in line with grandpas everywhere: I'll go on the offensive and/or lie.
"I don't need your gizmos! In my day, 24 of us shared one computer that could only draw glasses!"
And damn it, we were happy.
[email protected] James Weldon will appear monthly in this space, alternating with Andy Prest.
