I was born in 1985, which makes me 31 today. Â I realize that I was born in a very special time in history. Â I remember cassettes. Â I remember making collect calls from the movie theater or after school sports to get a ride home. Â I remember getting a cell phone and the only thing I could do on it was play a stupid little game called snake, or call Mom if I really needed to. Â I grew up in a house that had a computer, but all I did on it as a kid was play PacMan. Â We didnât get the internet until I was in middle school.
There arenât a lot of people who can straddle the fence like this. Â I feel lucky enough to remember a time when if you made plans with someone, you kept them, because there was no last minute text option to cancel. Â I remember a time when instant gratification wasnât the norm and things were not always at our fingertips. Â There was a time before Wikipedia, when real encyclopedias existed, and sometimes I even asked a real librarian, in a library, for help.
However, technology was introduced at a very young age. Â We did have that computer upstairs that barely did anything. Â I also had the original Nintendo. Â When I was 14 and got my first cell phone, I figured that thing out in a day (there wasnât much to it). Â I was also eager to learn about technology and saw how important it was going to be. Â
Alas, despite my familiarity with technology, I am an immigrant. Â I was not born into a world with a Facebook account. Â I signed up for one as a freshman in college, at the age of 18. Â While I work at an Apple store, and my life is literally inundated with technology, it has not always been this way.Â
I feel that being young enough to embrace technology wholeheartedly, yet old enough to remember a time without it, puts me and people around my age in a funny situation. Â There arenât many of us, and we will soon be seen as old. Â We will be those people who actually had a visor in their car full of CDâs we burned ourselves using files downloaded from Napster. Â I consider it a privilege to have known both worlds first-hand, lucky enough to easily embrace change at a young age, yet mature enough to realize the value in a world that relied less on technology and more on interpersonal connections, local neighborhoods, and physical communities that we partook in more actively. Â There are so many great things about technology and how it connects people differently, but there was a quaint-ness, almost provincial feeling about growing up in a suburb of Boston without an internet connection and only a single telephone for my family of four. Â
Those days are never coming back, unless I marry someone Amish.  I am one of the youngest âdigital immigrantsâ around, but I am still an immigrant, just first generation.  Iâm like, off the boat immigrant, but I was probably about twelve years old.  Like any person who arrives in a foreign land at 12, I have embraced this new world and feel comfortable here, but I have not forgotten where I came from. Â