Sophia Maynard

Intergenerational Interview

For this interview, I chose to interview my dad, Michael Maynard, about the way that computer utilization has transformed throughout his life. Born in 1966, he’s a part of an interesting generation that didn’t grow up with computers/internet technologies, yet they are now critical in his everyday life, essential to both his job and other everyday practices.

In high school, my dad used an electric typewriter to write essays — a technology that didn’t include the luxury of “deleting” anything. He said that to avoid typos, he would usually write his first drafts down by hand, on paper, and then type the work on the electric typewriter. This must have made you a much more careful writer, I thought, because you were forced to perfect drafts on paper before going to type out the finished project. Just the opposite is true however, in my dad’s experience, because with deletion technology, you can write out whatever you want and the writing experience is far more simplified. His first experience using a computer came about in high school, when his father bought a TS-80 computer, and his high school offered a class in “Basic Computers”. (My dad and I went to the same public high school – pretty sure those same computers from the ’80s are still in the technology classrooms!) Computer usage increased during his college years, but still not by much, because the technology was still pretty crude. My dad recalls someone bringing a computer to his dorm floor, and all the other students being shocked at how amazing it was. Between ’84-’88, my dad surmised that 90% of the other students in his college did not have/use computers.

During the mid ’90s, my parents had a computer in their apartment, but it wasn’t until ’98-2000 when Internet/modem usage became more prevalent in their lives. Today, my dad works in corporate communications, and computers are intrinsic in his daily work. From having meetings to sending emails and typing documents online, in just a couple of decades, computers have completely transformed the way that he writes.

I had never asked either of my parents about what the technological constraints of their upbringings were in such depth before. The part of my conversation with my dad that I found the most fascinating was when he was talking about his college experience with a lack of computers, and how everyone got along just fine without them, and when someone did have a computer, it was seen as something unusual. It’s difficult for me to imagine my college years without my laptop and phone constantly in my backpack, however I can conceptualize on some levels what life would have been like, as my favorite method of note-taking remains using a pen and notebook.

In just a few decades, the experience of the college student has changed so drastically that it’s difficult for a student in the present day to imagine what student life would have been like in the past without modern technology. In both experiences, students are able to find success in their studies, but the way that we learn, how we go about showcasing what we’ve learned, and even who can see our work (typing essays on electric typewriters, which will probably only be seen by the student and teacher vs writing blogposts for the entire globe to theoretically view) has changed forever.