idk how these people function in day to day life. remember folks: teach your kids about the computers

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4347660&forum_id=2#38863408)

Throughout middle school, I played online adventure games—many with a social element—for hours on end. I used the handle Athena. I made friends with an excellent crew of hackers, CB aficionados, metalheads, tech-curious athletes, and X-Men obsessives. Those early experiences with computers opened my imagination to new realms. They introduced me to a vast range of other minds. And they taught me the awesomely flexible and playful idiom I still encounter on Twitter.

In the early 1990s, I signed up for CompuServe and found email every bit as enchanting as the computer “conferences” I’d loved as a kid. Getting regular mail is fantastic, but suddenly letters could be exchanged so fast—and email brought with it new conventions that allowed for experimentation in innuendo, humor, and what were, for me at the time, uncharacteristically brave forms of expression.

In the next decade, I acquired a Motorola Razr almost the instant I saw one; then a BlackBerry; and finally an iPhone. Somewhere along the way the internet and television of my childhood merged with the mobile telephone of my young adulthood and became something magnificent, and at once, always by my side, a world of imaginative possibilities in one elegant rectangle of glass. While I’ve dropped many online practices and most social networks over the years, as the internet and I both change, I rarely feel guilty about using my phone. I’ve written about the internet for decades, from the point of view, mostly, of embrace. The digital era is where I feel at home.

WHEN MY KIDS WERE BORN, in 2005 and 2009, and I mounted photo after photo of them on Facebook with overworked captions, I envied them being born into a digital world. Lucky kids, they also had me—a chic internet habitué, not some Luddite rube afraid of her own shadow online, terrified of selfies and convinced she might restrict her household to 20 minutes a day “on the internet,” as if anyone in our time ever fully gets off.

https://www.vogue.com/article/parentings-new-frontier-no-smartphones

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4347660&forum_id=2#38863418)