Back In The 1980's

As mentioned in my previous blog: “Internet Connect”, internet has been a revolutionary resource that has broadened peoples connections all around the world, but most importantly it is the home of most of the information that exists, or has existed in our time. As I read, I thought about how internet can contain so much information. Internet becomes a colloquial tool, that I never thought about its significance, but now that I do it is mind blowing.

Internet was created around the 1980’s and now I am viewing internet as a teenager would in those times. It’s incredible. How is it possible that whatever I want to find is located in this place, that I can’t even touch, called the internet. Its another world. How can all the information be saved in one place, but at the same time we don’t see it? I don’t understand how people can speak badly of something so incredible and unreal. Now I understand why my grandmother sometimes can’t understand how google works. But now that I think about it neither can I. I know how to follow the steps to find the information, but I have no clue, how this thing called Google “which has fulfilled the original dream of digital machines becoming extensions of our memory” (124) can bring all the information related to a topic that I just type in the search bar. Who is doing the searching? This is just giving me a headache.

But what mostly gives me a headache is college applications. Just a half an hour ago I was with my father at the dinner table. We were having a discussion about how stressed I was due to the college applications. My father can’t seem to understand why I hate this time of the year. He thinks applying to college is really easy, that one doesn’t have to study for the SAT, and that the essay is just a paper you right in three hours instead of drafting it five times. He said that in his time of applying to college people weren’t as stressed about this process as now a days because they didn’t know as much about the colleges, or admittance rates. People just applied and that was it.

My father is right, it’s not that people now are smarter that makes getting into college so difficult, it’s that the amount of information on this process is so overwhelming that people don’t know what to do with it, so we all go crazy. Instead, if we were in the 80’s we’d probably be stressing about if our transcripts arrived to the colleges that we were applying to, because they were sent by boat.

Internet has brought amazing things to our world, I don’t know what I would be doing without it, but I do think that before things were simpler. Less stressful. I wish I was in the 80’s right now, before internet.

Visual Vocabulary:

Mesmerizing:

capture the complete attention of (someone); transfix.

Intricate:

very complicated or detailed.