I’m new to the technology game. I put my first computer on my desk this past summer, the week after I gave up the presidency of George Washington University and the last three secretaries in the Western World who took dictation in shorthand. Now I have a PC on my desk at home and on campus, a Blackberry on my hip and a cell phone in my pocket. I’ve made it from the 19th to the 20th century – I’m not sure I’m fully into the 21st. I hunt and peck, haven’t mastered etiquette and fumble when the phone is on vibrate.
My wife and children, on the other hand, are what is known as early adopters. In the mid 1980s my wife was using Lotus 123 and a long gone word processing system known as MultiMate. When managing a large construction project on a spreadsheet, she called up the file, left the room, got a cup of coffee, walked to the mail room, stopped at the rest room and made it back to her office as the file was opening up. Two decades ago, that was a time saving device. She trained women to use computers by assuring that if they could use a slicing disk on their Cuisinart or put a bobbin on a Singer Sewing Machine, they could insert a floppy diskette into a computer. Who cared what was inside the Cuisinart – and who cared about the guts of the CPU? Turning it on and making it go was all that mattered.
She is currently working on play lists for her iPod. We have mood music at dinner, relaxing music for weekend reading, spirited songs for exercising and upbeat vocals for long drives. The choices appear to be endless and so is the mix-and-match philosophy. My sons have spent most of their lives around technology. My eldest, Adam, believes that Coleco Industries (of Cabbage Patch dolls fame) named their first computer, the Adam, after him and not the Biblical source! He knows several languages (allowing for English, none of the others rooted in Latin) – the latest being PHP, founded a Web-based start-up and now works in Silicon Valley. My youngest, Ben, home when his older brother was away at college, always had the assignment of setting his grandfather’s digital watch, organizing the VCR to record, downloading “stuff” for everyone to read. His stint as a college newspaper editor taught him the fundamentals of lots of things I can’t do, but then again, my father said that about my time at law school, when I told him that Shepardizing had nothing to do with wool or mutton chops. Both boys now seek their own news sources online. They remind me of the scene from the 1973 movie, The Way We Were – the one where Robert Redford and Bradford Dillman are in a sailboat on a lazy afternoon and they ask, back and forth, “Best month? Best Saturday afternoon? Best Year? My kids have bookmarked the best page for best political news, best for local sports, yet another best for special interests. It is like the wine dealer who no longer requires you to buy a pre-packaged case in order to get the 10% discount: now you can select any 12 bottles you wish and still get the sale price. In the restaurant they let you order “surf and turf.” Or as the 2000-year-old man would say: “A nectarine – half a peach, half a plum, a wonderful fruit.”
Beginning in mid-January, I will return to the classroom, something I haven’t done on a regular basis in several decades. Back in the day we read a book or two a week per course. No more, my faculty colleagues advise me. Too expensive. Both books and time are too dear for such assignments. I’m starting out with a seminar, twelve graduate students around an oval table. Will they be content to read and talk and read some more, or will we interact online, popping questions to each other at a moment’s notice, posting articles and commentary back and forth? I suspect it will be a little of each: one giant step for me into their world, a hop, skip and jump for them back into mine. For one, the technology revolution is evolutionary, for the other, technology is the here and now, morphing into something neither of us can predict. I’m going to cater coffee and bagels. New faculty, like me, need all the friends we can get.
