I'm not sure when we first got a computer, but for as long as I remember, we've had a computer in our house. My favorite activity on the computer as a young kid was playing games. I'd play the latest hockey game for hours, sometimes with my brother, but mostly by myself because I didn't like it when he beat me and he always beat me. My mother didn't want my brain to go to mesh, though, so she also participated in some activities with me using our computer. She would open Microsoft Word or whatever the word processing program before that was, and we would type up the names of all of my favorite hockey players, trying to spell their names correctly. Even though this was a kind of schoolwork, I loved doing it because it involved hockey and I liked seeing the players' names pop up on the computer screen.
The three technologies that I carry with me all the time are my phone, my ipod and my laptop. None of the three are very fancy or advanced form of their technologies. I had the same cell phone from sophomore year of high school all the way up til my sophomore year of college before I finally got a phone with a keyboard. I've also had my ipod for years and years and haven't had any interest in upgrading. I got my laptop at the beginning of college four years ago and it's held up for me pretty well. I also have the basic in video gaming technology in the very outdated PS2, which has lasted me over ten years. I really don't have a "technology wishlist", although every time I see a commercial with a touch phone or an ipod touch, it makes my mouth water a little, but with how I treat my phones in terms of dropping and losing them, I don't feel as if an iphone would last very long in my possession.
I remember my first encounter with a cell phone. It's kind of funny because I never really wanted one. In high school, a lot of other people were getting them but I never really gave in to the peer pressure. "Who am I going to call that I can't just call their home?" I always thought. The pressure I had to give in to was from my mother. She basically forced a cell phone on me because she wanted me to use it for keeping in touch with her and telling her when I needed to be picked up from school. After a while, I did discover texting however, and that made my phone a lot more fun than I first thought.
Maybe this is just because I haven't had a lot of practice on them and that I've grown up using PCs, but Mac computer's give me a lot of frustration. The fact that there is only one button on the mouse always drives me crazy. When I'm typing something in Microsoft Word, I try to right click to see if the word the computer underlined in red is really spelled wrong but i can't get it because the mouse doesn't have a right click option. The minimize and maximize buttons always used to give me fits as well until I finally realized which was which and burnt that into my memory.
I'd still consider myself now as an amateur in terms of computer literacy. In the prewriting questions there are a lot of options for this question and I'm embarrassed to say that I only know what one of them is. I do spend a lot of time on my computer but it's mostly just on Facebook or other Internet sites such as ESPN and CNN and the St. Cloud State site. I don't really play games online and I don't have my own website. This class was the first time I uploaded a video onto Youtube and I've never heard of a wiki or a standalone computer. In terms of my computer literacy, I know what I like and how to do that, but things I don't like or have never experienced, I don't know how to do.
I'd definitely fall under the category of a late adopter in terms of technology. I still have a PS2, which at the time I bought it might have made me an early adopter, but the fact that I haven't updated in ten plus years doesn't help my cause. Having the same phone for as long as I had definitely made me a late adopter in terms of the flip or the keyboard phones. The fact that I still don't have a phone with a touch screen or Internet access makes me a late adopter of technology. Like I said before, I find things that I like and that I get comfortable using and then I don't feel I have any reason to change unless I get one as a present or my piece of technology breaks. I've had incredible luck with my pieces of technology (knock on wood) that none of them have really broken and I haven't been forced to upgrade.
Texting has actually had a pretty good effect on some of my relationships. It really helps a shy guy like me express myself in ways that I might not be able to in person. I got to know my girlfriend mostly through emails, Facebook and texting. We lived in different places and so over the summer, we'd send lots of texts to each other and that really helped us bond and get to know each other. I know there are plenty of drawbacks to texting, including the fact that it's impossible to tell if someone is being sarcastic or if they are angry at you, but in my life it's been a great tool to help build relationships.
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