Technology Narrative: My World Surrounded By Computers

My World Surrounded By Computers
“Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living,” Nicholas Negroponte once said those words that I strongly agree with. In today’s world computing is everywhere; it has become intertwined with our daily lives. My generation was fortunate enough to grow up with computers literally in our hands. From the time I entered school in kindergarten; I was using a computer and attending required computer classes to speed up my typing and such. From kindergarten until now I have always had a class that required me to either use the computer or learn more about a computer. As my mother has said, “I was born and raised in the computer era”.
I was nor will I ever be a complete computer savvy person but I have spent much of my life typing away on the keyboard. Whether I am sending a friend a facebook message, instant messaging my family members, or emailing my professors; I am almost always using a computer to “write”. I must admit that even though I have grown up with computers by my side I rarely take full advantage of them. I’ve never owned a website or written a blog or journal, or even posted anything on eBay or Amazon. As far as my contributions to the world wide writing web go; I’m only known on MySpace and facebook. I currently only have a facebook account because I dropped my MySpace account when it became “unpopular” my junior year of high school (now it’s all about facebook or twitter, which I do not have either). My facebook usage is limited to the occasional message or facebook “chat” with friends. Most of my facebook usage goes to leaving my friends comments on their “walls” or pictures, nothing too exciting. I also can sometimes be found writing a facebook “note” that seems to be popular at the time. I know that eventually I will have to do a lot more writing on the computer but until then I am completely content with my progress so far.
In high school it was a requirement to take a computer class in order to graduate. During my freshman and senior year of high school I had taken classes to enhance my computer skills. I learned many programs such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and I also got to learn how to make a webpage. As a freshman in college last year many of my classes actually required me to be able to use Word and PowerPoint and so I was very glad that I was capable of handling myself with those types of programs. As an English major I have found that computers are taken over my intended field of work. Newspapers and magazines are slowly but surely being transformed into online forms. Obviously because of the mass need to be globalized many writers and journalists are required to be very fluent in computer skills in order to survive this transformation from paper to screen. Hopefully with this class I will be able to enhance my computer skills and my interest in using the computer to write more.