The Tartan

By Eshaan Joshi

What does it mean to be a generation raised by technology? Does it mean being a generation that grew up with technology? A generation that watched its growing pains and struggles, that lived through the day-to-day difficulties of opening a computer or using a clunky Xerox machine that spent half its time broken and the other half complaining about PC LOAD LETTER (whatever the hell that is)? Is it the generation that worked on the algorithms that made sure you could waste away fixing those Xerox machines and clunky computers? Is it those born in the era where a computer was a room of circuits that did the same thing you could underpay a person to do instead? Or, is it the generation that saw the sleekness of the computer, the complexities collapsed and destroyed, who were handed user-friendly devices that were meant to be a joy?

There’s been a slow and concerted change in what it means to use technology and see the world. For a long time, when you said you were a tech person, that meant slaving away trying to get things to work. It meant that you knew the guts of your machine inside and out, that you used it for more than just data entry. It meant you spent your time figuring things out.

That was the era where the Personal Computer (PC) reigned supreme and technology was finally “in your home” — it was something beautiful. During that era, the MIT Hacker Culture, Stallman and GNU, the Linux kernel, and Open Source took center stage. It’s that generation, the one that saw technology become accessible and knew how to break and bend it, that celebrated the genuine joy of a piece of hardware or software. 

What happened?

Well, the mobile revolution killed the personal computer. Not in the sense that the PC stopped being used. Hell, it’s even more ubiquitous today than it was a few dozen years ago, but it stopped being people’s primary method of interfacing with technology. Instead of the PC, which moved computing from clusters and terminals (something which also changed the culture of computing) to the home, the phone moved it from the home to the palm of your hand. And this coincided with the death of the PC as a sort of new TV — the PC wasn’t the family computer anymore, it was a single person’s device.

But phones don’t have keyboards, sockets, weird connectors, or anything like that. They’re too small. They’re meant to be universal. They need to be easy. And those PCs? Well, you didn’t have the luxury of having several people use them one at a time, one of whom was bound to know how to fix a problem. Now, one person uses one computer. And if one person uses one computer, you better damn well make sure that they can use it easily. 

Things started getting streamlined. People started being removed from the nuts and bolts that made their computers work. It started getting easy.

This is, obviously, a biased retelling of history. Most of us have dealt with enough ancient grandparents or completely clueless uncles who have needed us to show them, step-by-step, how to open a file, close a window, or turn off the computer itself. We’ve dealt with people who do not know how to use their technology, who get confused at every new feature. We’ve grown up with the usual tools and safety features of our phones and laptops being easily accessible. Sure, I can change notification sounds — I just tap a few things, and I know instinctively where they are.

But if you ask me to messwith my computer? Really messwith it, open it up, try something new? I got no clue. For the vast, vast majority, a laptop is a glorified browser with storage. The phone is a couple of apps with a camera and an SMS service. There’s a new tech culture, and it’s that things just oughta work.

When we say we’re a generation raised on technology, we’re telling the truth. People now have unbridled access to technology, from birth onwards. We have tablets and iPads and smartwatches and so much more. We’re entangled with them. We pay for things with our wrists, we watch dramatic films meant for screens larger than the palm of our hands, but we’re also not the generation raised on bugs.

We’re not the generation that was raised on the weeds of technology. We grew up when things were good, when crashes were rare and recovery was consistent. We grew up when we didn’t have to disassemble and reassemble parts just to get something to work normally. We grew up when technology was meant to be another tool, not a puzzle to solve.

I’m not saying it’s bad. The heights we reach are so much higher than anyone before us could’ve dreamed. Nobody who sat down on ENIAC envisioned an entire world running on computers, and I don’t think in the wildest coke-fueled fantasies of the venture capitalists of the ‘90s did they see the dotcom bubble turning into the Apple Watch.

But the claim that we’re the first generation raised on technology is one that is, to some extent, incomplete. We’re the first generation raised with a product, but the generation that grew with technology, well, they were raised with it too.

They were raised with the dial-up internet, the “You’ve Got Mail!”, the weird beach ball of death, and the gothic horror of Clippy. They grew up with open source, and software meant to free us from “The Man” — from Firefox to technology that didn’t ever do exactly what you expected. We don’t get to claim that, because we grew up somewhere else. And the people growing up now, well, they’re growing up elsewhere still.

Alan Turing never really knew what he did when he wrote his thesis so long ago. His discoveries raised generations. His technology raised generations. From the room-sized computers that you needed to get in line to use, to the clusters of computers and the family PC you’d huddle around like a pre-war family with their TV, to the laptop and the tablet and the smartwatch, we were all raised with technology. Just never the technology that people thought we’d see.