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maeve66What would your life be like now without the internet?
That icon is me before the internet. Way before the internet. It's a good question. I don't think my students can even imagine it. I can remember it, as an adult, even. I didn't really even think about the internet much until graduate school, in 1990. So I was already twenty-four years old.
What would it be like now... if it suddenly disappeared? Or if it had never come into being? They seems like different questions.
Well, I'd probably own a set of encyclopedias. We always had at least one when I was growing up, because my mom was a reference librarian, and as the library got new ones and sold the out-of-date ones (the REALLY, REALLY out-of-date ones, not last year's model... I imagine they were only replaced every decade or so) she would scoop a set up.
I would still be designing a month for Slingshot, which I've given up in protest because I feel like even anarchists should be able to whomp up an app version which could be disseminated electronically, for fuck's sake. I don't USE the paper version; I can't give up my iCal. But I'd love to be able to DECORATE my iCal... Sigh.
I would be a more frequent user of the library for sure.
I'd probably subscribe to: the NYT, the Nation, National Geographic, Archaeology magazine, Against the Current, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple (embarrassing as that is), and the Onion.
If there's no internet, there's no email, right? I would still be writing letters, then. I had a far-flung and deep-rooted correspondence before email. I wrote a lot of long, long letters, and got a lot more actual mail than I do now.
I would struggle more with recording assignments and calculating grades.
I would spend a lot of money photocopying images and making transparencies of them for class.
Student cheating would be old school: some other student would have written the cheating paper or it would be directly from an encyclopedia and obviously so. Not that their new school cheating is ever hard to see -- they're not really sharp enough to disguise what they steal, so googling one phrase usually gets the original in one second. Weird.
I would have seen a lot less porn, for sure.
Memes would be ... slower? I am not even sure how stuff like that even functioned before the internet. I mean, there was gossip, and that spread hella fast. People told each other about books, or you saw a display at the library or bookstore. People ... told jokes, I guess. Or told stories. But the jokes were often not funny. Only a crazy cat lady would have an entire set of 35 images of funny cats. They would be local cats, not cats from Japan.
I would not be writing this unless I had a local column, and I wouldn't have a newspaper column unless I was a twelve year old making up a handmade newspaper.
That icon is me before the internet. Way before the internet. It's a good question. I don't think my students can even imagine it. I can remember it, as an adult, even. I didn't really even think about the internet much until graduate school, in 1990. So I was already twenty-four years old.
What would it be like now... if it suddenly disappeared? Or if it had never come into being? They seems like different questions.
Well, I'd probably own a set of encyclopedias. We always had at least one when I was growing up, because my mom was a reference librarian, and as the library got new ones and sold the out-of-date ones (the REALLY, REALLY out-of-date ones, not last year's model... I imagine they were only replaced every decade or so) she would scoop a set up.
I would still be designing a month for Slingshot, which I've given up in protest because I feel like even anarchists should be able to whomp up an app version which could be disseminated electronically, for fuck's sake. I don't USE the paper version; I can't give up my iCal. But I'd love to be able to DECORATE my iCal... Sigh.
I would be a more frequent user of the library for sure.
I'd probably subscribe to: the NYT, the Nation, National Geographic, Archaeology magazine, Against the Current, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple (embarrassing as that is), and the Onion.
If there's no internet, there's no email, right? I would still be writing letters, then. I had a far-flung and deep-rooted correspondence before email. I wrote a lot of long, long letters, and got a lot more actual mail than I do now.
I would struggle more with recording assignments and calculating grades.
I would spend a lot of money photocopying images and making transparencies of them for class.
Student cheating would be old school: some other student would have written the cheating paper or it would be directly from an encyclopedia and obviously so. Not that their new school cheating is ever hard to see -- they're not really sharp enough to disguise what they steal, so googling one phrase usually gets the original in one second. Weird.
I would have seen a lot less porn, for sure.
Memes would be ... slower? I am not even sure how stuff like that even functioned before the internet. I mean, there was gossip, and that spread hella fast. People told each other about books, or you saw a display at the library or bookstore. People ... told jokes, I guess. Or told stories. But the jokes were often not funny. Only a crazy cat lady would have an entire set of 35 images of funny cats. They would be local cats, not cats from Japan.
I would not be writing this unless I had a local column, and I wouldn't have a newspaper column unless I was a twelve year old making up a handmade newspaper.