I’ve been doing some basic internet lessons with my friend Benjamin lately, to better prepare him for his upcoming fellowship, which will largely be done over the net. He’s used a computer plenty of times before, but it’s far from second-nature and the internet is still a very new tool. It’s so interesting to help someone use the internet for the first time, and you forget how second-nature (first-nature?) those skills have become for most of us. When we want to close any page, or log-out of any account, we naturally know to look somewhere in the right upper-hand corner. When looking at text on a page, we automatically know which things we can click on to reach another page, and which things are just plain words. Have you ever tried describing the difference between when you should click with the left and when with the right? When to double-click? It’s like knowing when to switch your lightswitch on or off…we just KNOW.
We know where to find toolbars without even thinking…and what options are tucked into those toolbars…and how choosing those options can change your experience on that page, or in that browser. We know what “browser” means. We don’t think about terminology like “tabs”, “favorites”, “blogs”, “hyperlinks”, “log-in”, “profile”, “wall”, “search engine”, “spam”. We long-ago stopped questioning the seemingly nonsensical (okay, maybe the internet is still third-hand for some of us) reasons for starting every web site name with “www.” and ending it with “.com.” And all of a sudden seeing a “.org” or, gasp, a “.co.uk” doesn’t throw us into a tizzy. Even longer ago, we stopped reading every little pop-up message, almost always intuiting whether we should press “okay” or “cancel” or just close the box full of choices for 100s of annoying different cursers in all the colors of the rainbow doing all the irritating blinking and twisting and sparkling imaginable—with an eyeroll and a scowl, no less. We know that if a Facebook ad offers us free scholarships and green cards to study in “Hawaiian Paradise America UK”, something smells a little fishy…
The internet has inexplicably become almost an extension of ourselves, something we flow into and out of with such familiarity, we don’t think a lot about it anymore
But the coolest part about watching the internet unfold for someone for the first time is the re-realization of all the doors that swing open and all of the opportunities that become possible. Benjamin has connected with people he went to school with, he can “cyber-meet” the other fellows months in advance as if they were already friends, he can email clients thousands of miles away…and then there was GOOGLE. I showed him Google for the first time yesterday and, contrary to what I think I probably googled when it was my first time (my own name? the weather? re-googling “google” just to see if the world might explode?), he immediately started searching for information about the Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom and Ugandan history, papers on beekeeping in Africa, and news about Moammar Godhafi. In other words, you don’t have to tell someone how powerful internet-searching can be…he understood in an instant that he had just accessed a whole different world of information and resources. To see that happen was really, really, really cool.
Now we just have to have that whole “not everything you read on the internet is true” conversation! Lord help us once he discovers Wikipedia…
