Bit by bit the electronic age sidled up alongside me, promised great and wonderful things if I would just make one little exception to my life-long refusal to allow it to dominate my home.
My first 35 years, while everyone else chatted about their favorite shows, I lived without a television, content with a modest radio and record player.
Then I bought one small, handheld PacMan game for one child’s birthday and it’s been all down here from there. A few months later I found a second-hand Atari console with a several game cartridges. A great buy, except without a television we could not use it – at least not until I found an old black-and-white set at a yard sale.
All it took was one semester of Introduction to Computers and I wanted one. We did not need a computer. Not with the perfectly good manual typewriter I had received in high school and used through college for writing papers and my weekly letters to loved ones. I still insisted we needed to buy a computer.
My husband found a portable computer. We invested more money in that computer than we have since in television sets, VCRs, DVD player, cassette players, record players or radios combined. Although it was termed portable, it was nowhere near as thin as the laptop I now own. We used 5-inch floppy disks to save our programs and letters. My son, the computer geek, cut his computing teeth on that machine, taught himself his first couple computer languages and wrote a program that he sold for half the cost of the computer.
As a child, I missed every episode of Bewitched. Now I watch re-runs on Hulu.com as I use my exercise machine. My grandparents the farmers did not need an exercise machine to clock the miles they walked and calories they burned. The cattle and crops took care of burning off all their excess calories.
The farming grandparents somehow managed to survive, even thrive without cell phones, computers, Internet or electronic games and gadgets. I thought I could, too. But according to our children, we can’t. They insisted we needed a cell phone – and gave us one a few years ago and told us to use it.
Six, seven years later, we still have the same cell phone. My husband still fumbles to pull it out of his pocket and connect to the caller before it goes to voice mail. But I don’t. At least not with my cell phone. I pulled it out this morning to call the computer at work and clocked-in for the day on my way to an assignment.
My ancestors wondered why they needed a crank phone wired into their home. I use my wireless phone to take pictures, log my phone calls, retain the numbers of contact and send post cards – okay call them text messages. And, if I ever figure it out and decide to use it, I could also connect with the world wide web and do much, much more.
In some respects, I do the exact same thing that my parents and grandparents did to stay connected with family and friends. They wrote letters, read the newspapers, found interesting articles and obituaries to clip and send to my folks along with their weekly letters. I forward links to articles or videos I find interesting. Each December, my mother shared family news with friends. Today we keep a Facebook page, a weblog of family events and send out our thoughts, rants and raves before we can change our minds about what we wrote.
My aunts took pictures, had the film developed and sent us a copy along with a letter in an envelope. But today, I can take hundreds of pictures with no thought for the cost of developing the film, post them to my picture website and show them to family hundreds of miles away shortly after shooting the last frame. Last month we realized that those thousands of family pictures and slides stored in slide trays and picture albums could all be digitized and stored on a high density postage-stamp sized photo cards that slid into a camera smaller than a bar of soap.
I may not have blue ray, innumerable applications on cell phones or voice activated anything, but from living the first half of my life without a television, I definitely have entered the electronic age.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org)