Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here

I thought the teens and pre-teens were the sound­ing board for tomor­rows tech­nol­ogy.   Well this isn’t always the case.   I pre­vi­ously men­tioned talk­ing with my brother over the week­end.   Well there is more to it then just the secu­rity post that came out of it.   He com­plained that he wasn’t get­ting con­fir­ma­tion e-mails for some of the web ser­vices he was using and he thought they may be get­ting caught by his spam fil­ter.   I asked him which e-mail provider he was using.  He’s using his ISP.….….…..

I may be 32, but I have two broth­ers that are twins that are thir­teen years old.   They have the fear of shar­ing their name online and every­thing else they will get over as they get older (or become com­pletely para­noid and with­draw from the Inter­net entirely by the time they are 20).   They don’t how­ever use web based e-mail.  I under­stand that they should be show­ing me what is new and inter­est­ing, so I expected Myspace or some such ser­vice for send­ing e-mails to friends.  Well they don’t, but part of that is that my 26 year old brother who sets up the web fil­ter­ing for my dad frowns upon Myspace for that age group because of wor­ry­ing about pedophiles I sup­pose (though a child is 99.9 more likely to be molested by a rel­a­tive or imme­di­ate friend of the fam­ily instead of being attacked by an online preda­tor).   My father and step-mother aren’t too hot on it either — they believe in the sun­shine and dirt makes strong boys.   I’m more of the give me a book and a bed to lay on, or a lap­top and a Game­boy with a bed to lay on type of guy.

They don’t how­ever use web based e-mail — I haven’t used a strictly POP3 mail solu­tion since col­lege — so 14 years of using web based e-mail.  With the excep­tion of cor­po­rate mail I can’t under­stand using it any other way.   Spam con­trol is eas­ier, you can access your e-mail from any­where, you can archive your mail online with­out ever los­ing any­thing.  I started a series about com­put­ing in the clouds and even did one sub­ject on web based e-mail.  The gen­er­a­tion that comes after us (and the age dif­fer­ence is pretty much a gen­er­a­tion) should have a more refined method of han­dling data.   It’s seems they choose to ham­string them­selves then to learn and be more inter­ac­tive.   That is not the case.

I have a sis­ter that is pretty much from the mind set of using the com­puter as a util­ity or appli­ance.   It’s some­thing that’s only slightly more inter­ac­tive then a game sys­tem or tele­vi­sion set.   I under­stand that men­tal­ity.   I fig­ured how­ever it was some­thing that would end with my gen­er­a­tion.  It seems not, the next gen­er­a­tion at least in my fam­ily is not grasp­ing and mak­ing tech work for them they are work­ing for their tech­nol­ogy.  What I mean by that is they put more effort into the com­puter then they need to, the com­puter should be a tool to make things faster and eas­ier.   Not using it to the fullest extent you can and stream­lin­ing what you do is almost a shame.

My 26 year old brother and myself when we had our own com­put­ers kept push­ing the line and see­ing what we can do next.  He was twelve/thirteen when I went to col­lege and he was run­ning his own BBS.   He went the design and pro­gram­ming route.  I went the secu­rity and archi­tec­ture route.   Both of us are very good at what we do in our own fields — at least we think so.  Though we have very lit­tle over­lap since both of us view the other per­son as focus­ing on the wrong things.  The thir­teen year olds don’t have the same in depth inter­ac­tion with their com­put­ers.   Maybe this is a prob­lem with grow­ing up with com­put­ers their whole lives.   It’s not viewed with the same regard as it was for me and my next youngest brother.

It does give me some slight hope that the cur­rent twenty some­thing and young thirty some­things are the height of the inter­net users while the rest of them stag­nate and fully pushed the line.   But the youngest broth­ers have a few years to catch up and may do some­thing with it yet, so I can’t fully dis­count them until the future arrives.

Now if they are read­ing this — go get a Gmail address and learn how to use it.   My father-in-law and mother-in-law have even moved to Gmail and it only took them a few min­utes to learn it.