I recently joined Facebook.
Against my better judgement, of course. But I had a friend move from coast-to-coast, who threatened to not talk to me again if I did not have better communications channels.
As most people find, slowly family/friends/ex-es from the past fall out of the sky and find you on this site. I am no different, amusingly, considering my relatively dull and boring life.
However it has brought up a very interesting paradox. That is, when people contact me via Facebook, most of them are from my past where I surfed the internet via GOPHER and LYNX, and most of them didn’t know what an internet was, let alone that it would be “invented” in the extremely late twentieth century, then pluralized less than a decade later.
These were friends who could only operate a Nintendo (queue the obligatory exhale into the guts); looked to those nerds like me to even begin to decipher starting a game of DOOM on the computer.
Ok, more starting the game with the DOS prompt than the playing. I never was any good without my IDKFA (50 Falquan Fun Bucks if you know what I’m talking about).
How now, are they just as versed in internet lingo as I? So ready to drop a “lol” and roll an emoticon? Where did I disappear to in the last ten years? I learned this all through my nerdery and such, but, now… it’s almost cheapened.
Maybe I’m more concerned that the year of the nerd is over before I actually made a living off of it. It’s not super far-fetched; every day systems, integrations, and programming languages fall closer and closer to a “functional” syntax, in that they will get to a point that anyone can very easily instruct a computer to perform a task in almost native syntax.
A proposition I find very cool, actually.
It’s not there yet, no. But I’m starting to wonder exactly where I fit in, again. Much like back in the day when I was outcast for my nerdery.
Now, my nerdery be mainstream.
What, exactly is the next step?