Mike+Jones+Technology+Discovery

In September, I read Sherry Turkle's Falling for Science as required reading in KMDI 1001, a graduate level course in the Knowledge Media and Design interdisciplinary program.

I read it in one sitting - it was that interesting. The combination of Turkle's perspective and the short individual stories regarding technological/object attachment was quite extraordinary.

I immediately emailed the course professor, Dr. Megan Boler, and suggested that she make such personal narratives the first online contribution. She agreed, and we all did a narrative.

This is my submission, verbatim as posted to UT Portal. Blackboard sucks so bad I had to actually copy my text into Word and reformat it there, so if it's out of whack aesthetically, I apologize. At least Wikispaces allows embedded video. (Hint to Blackboard - social media exists. Integrate or die.)

But it's a just-under 500 word bit on one of many personal technology discoveries. I've got others if you'd like. You'll find your own. Enjoy the discovery.



This past Christmas, I received what was probably the best present ever - a weird glimpse into a long-distant past that exemplified Turkle's notion of scientific passion being fueled by near-fetishistic fascination with objects.

I'll let my ten-year old self tell the story, as only he can tell it.

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At the time, this was very much a Eureka moment. This wasn't an entry into personal computing - my father, an educational technologist working at SFU at the time, had already assured that I'd experimented with computers. Indeed, I'm featured on some strange Vancouver local cable TVish show he produced, where I'm the strange nerd who repurposed the Apple II trivial game "Shell Game" with questions about the life and times of Augustus Caesar. (I totally wish I was kidding. What grade 4 student does such things? I'm now realizing why those grade 7 kids always tried to beat me up.)

But this was my computer. And I treated it as much. I saved up all the money I earned from my paper route - delivering the long defunct Columbian newspaper - to buy a 16K RAM expansion to the VIC-20 for $100. My next $100 went to a 300-baud modem. I suddenly learned a lot about online communication, if only through the strange underground netherworld that was warez trading. As I tell my students now, I've been doing illegal things online since well before they were born.

Also interesting is the ripple effect from this - my brother, who clearly not only inherited my hand me down clothing, but the smaller bowls my mother used to cut our hair - also inherited my technology hand-me-downs. When I got a C64 (way better games), he got the VIC-20, and proceeded to master it in a manner than put my nerdy BASIC trivia game hacking to shame. He went on to a career in programming for ten years, before giving up and appealing to his real passion, urban planning.

But what was really interesting from this gift was a glimpse into Eureka moments past. Age makes you understandably hardened and cynical. But here is this kid - who still looks like me (I age well, I guess) - who is clearly authentically in rapture over this object. It made me think when the last time I had such a reaction was. My annoyingly geeky 10 year old self somehow reminded me that there was something very right and proper about such unbridled enthusiasm. Coupled with the fact that the collection of videos had clips of my grandparents - the only two I got to know, since the others died when I was very young - and I'll be damned if I didn't shed a few tears watching the ghosts of Christmas past.