Internutty

Him: are you still on the interwebs?
Me: yes
Him: huh (judging)
Me: but this is for school!

I’m taking an online class this summer on crisis management. It mostly consists of trying to find current crises and analyzing how a company/organization manages the communications around the crisis. This means I spend a lot of time on the web looking for current crises. I repeat: my homework is to troll the Internet.

It’s a stark contrast with my undergraduate days. Back then we had to go into the library and actually look things up, using books. I don’t want this to turn into a “back in my day… I walked uphill both ways naked in the snow…” type of post, but the disparity is not lost on me. Sometimes I wonder how I even managed to get a bachelor’s degree before we started httping all over ourselves. How did I research a paper before Google became a verb?

Last weekend I was doing some closet organizing (yes, this is how exciting my life is, don’t be jealous) and I found a box full of my college papers. Keeping with my OCD nature, they were all filed in separate file folders labeled with the course name and, get this, course number. (I still do this, although it’s all on my hard drive now.) I laughed as I rummaged through four years of sometimes brilliant, sometimes bullshit, papers and presentations. Reading through papers from International Violence with Schmidt (we called him 007 as he used to work for the DOD and probably killed people), Quebec Separatist movement analysis and horribly written French lit papers brought back memories from one of the best times of my life. All this done without the Internet and with a motorized typewriter!

The first time I ever saw the Internet was when I lived in Paris the summer of 1992. I was 18 and stayed with the weirdest family in France – they were weird even by French standards. They didn’t drink or go out at night. We watched a lot of MacGyver, I guess he’s huge in France. I have vivid memories of watching the Summer Olympics, but not the games I was used to. Rowing, archery and handball made the highlights. To this day I have no idea what medals USA won that year. (France had 26 I believe. They rocked at handball.) I do know how to say, “get me a paperclip, 5 kilo dog and a packet of gum so I can get us out of this mess” in French. Thank you French MacGyver. My hostess was a professor at the university. One day we were in her office and she was “talking” with a colleague in the States on her computer. She had a green screen monitor. Everything involved prompts. I used email ONCE in my sophomore year in undergrad, and it was such a huge pain in the ass that I never used it again until my first job out of college.

Last night I posted my weekly assignment on Blackboard. The online blackboard, not the chalk and erasure kind. I rarely turn in hardcopies anymore. Winter quarter one my profs insisted that all papers be done on the team wiki. And that box of papers, so lovingly stored in my closet for the past 12 years? I recycled the whole thing. File folders and all.

Maintenant, m'obtenir un trombone, un chien de 5 kilo et un paquet de gomme si je peux nous obtenir de ce désordre.