The first piece of technology that I could call my own was a 13-inch Acer Chromebook. I won it in a raffle at the school fair during fifth grade. The fair had raffles every year, but the prizes were usually baskets of cheap art supplies and sandbox toys donated by the PTA. They were colorful and ribboned, bunched up to create a sense of abundance and framed perfectly to catch the eye of its elementary school audience. Every year, kids would beg their parents to give a dollar to the school for a ticket.
The Chromebook was not in a bundle. It needed none of the bits and baubles — it spoke for itself, in its thin, white and unadorned rectangular glory. In contrast with the watercolor paints and plastic shovels that stood beside it, it promised something completely novel — entry into another world entirely.
The online realm was not entirely alien to me as a kid. Our house had a desktop that was chunky and square. It belonged to my dad. He was a software engineer, which I understood to mean that he stared into the screen all day typing code to make websites better. The way he described it, he had gotten the job by being at the right place at the right time. The Internet had just become available for public use, and they were hiring anyone to do programming work — what else was there for a math major with no job prospects to do? All of a sudden, he found himself riding the wave of a technological revolution ushered in by the turn of the century.
The rest of society followed quickly in its heels. My mom was issued a laptop from her school for her elementary school teaching duties, which she allowed me to use occasionally for schoolwork. Then in fourth grade, my class got a cart full of Chromebooks to use as part of the pilot program for introducing computers to all the elementary schools in the district. I loved them because they meant I no longer had to write on dinky AlphaSmart 3000s anymore.
It was the time when I had first gotten entrenched in the delusion of becoming a writer for a living, and computer access seemed like a step towards becoming something of a Real Author, the type that went on to write entire novels in coffeeshops with their fancy laptops. I was nine years old then, and thus was free to imagine adulthood as something exciting and wonderful.
When my name was called as the winner of the Chromebook lottery, I was a year older and not much wiser. Even without the full knowledge of what I could do with technology, or what it would do to me, I knew I had been given something precious and valuable.
When I took it home and put it on my lap for the first time, I kept skimming my hand on the surface of it, as if in awe of its very existence. This was the new definition of adolescent freedom — not getting a car or staying up late, but free access to the Internet.
That Chromebook would stick with me all three years of middle school, before it started blacking out on random intervals and taking entire minutes to wake up again. During those years, I did end up using it to write, but my interests in the online space had expanded far beyond that. I kept in touch with friends, did an increasing amount of schoolwork, and ventured down niche Internet rabbit holes, some less advisable than others.
Now, electronic devices have become as natural an extension of myself as an arm or leg. Yet unlike the computer science majors I pass around campus every day, or even my dad as he types away at my home computer, how it works is just as arcane to me as it was all those years ago.
Its influence, however, has only grown. I see kids watching Cocomelon on padded iPads at dim sum restaurants and I wonder what future generations’ relationship with the online realm will look like. After all, even as a layman, I can tell our relationship with technology is changing.
It is a change that is both too obvious to put to words and so recent that it feels presumptuous to even compare it to other turning points in human history, as if we would be able to tell from this vantage point how the present cultural moment stacks up against all the ones that have ever preceded it.
Still, it is difficult to imagine anything that has more deeply changed the way we live. These tiny, sturdy machines, these pixel-forming words, the access to infinity, sprawling and sublime. They may be ubiquitous now, but I refuse to take it — or my winning raffle ticket — for granted.