For me, it all started with Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Together with a Klingon, an android and the guy from “Reading Rainbow,” Picard began his long and prosperous syndication the very month I was born; September of 1987.
It was a fitting beginning for a young man who quickly embraced—and was embraced by—the growing world of technology around him.
How do you measure a life?
For many of us students, born into an age of amassed gadgets, gizmos and thingamajigs, our time is defined by the sprockets in our pockets and the brands in our hands.
I learned to use the Nintendo’s boxy controller like it was a second language at the same time I was learning my first. My first three friends were a boy named Tristan, who I met through my grandma, and Mario and Sonic, who I met through my television.
As Tristan and I grew taller, so sprouted Sonic and Mario, both of whom gained a third dimension. Portable gaming via the Game Boy and Game Gear kept them with us at all times, or at least until we discovered Pokémon and felt compelled to catch them all.
High school was a lot of the same. It started with Smash Mouth on a Sony Discman, which sounds hilariously outdated to the music fans of today. We stood in line at Wal-Mart to play “SSX” on the PlayStation 2 on launch day, even though we couldn’t afford it. My dad bought our first family computer shortly after 9/11 to keep up with the news.
Then, it happened. My first cellular phone. The start of the rest of my life.
It was big, blue and brick-like. It didn’t have a silent mode and seemed happy to ring during Spanish class at least once a week. I set my ringtone to the Mexican hat dance in an attempt to appease my teacher. It didn’t work.
I went from pre-pay to pay-a-lot during my first year of college as I switched from Virgin Mobile to AT&T. I had a slider. It made a funny noise when you slid it open. It was, to put it in a word, annoying.
My first long-term relationship, to my high school sweetheart, got rocky around the time when the first iPhone was released. It ended two years later, shortly after the launch of the 3GS. I bought the iPhone 4 when I moved from New York to Florida. I still have it.
Today’s freshmen were born the year Al Gore coined the term “information superhighway,” and hit puberty around the time Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Many of them had cell phones in high school and laptops in their bedrooms. And that’s how they’ll remember their childhoods.
With our lives measured by upgrade cycles, Internet speeds and game consoles, technology has—for better or for worse—taken over. How do you let it define you?
