Call it the Abe Simpson principle. The cartoon patriarch, upon being told by his son Homer that he wasn’t “with it”, responded: “I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s it seems weird and scary to me.” Then he warned his son: “It’ll happen to you.”
Grampa Abe was right. When the term “digital native” was coined, I used to be one of them. I am part of the cohort that grew up in the information age. I have a distant memory of my mother’s computer — a white, bulky thing which played Solitaire, Minesweeper and a handful of MS-DOS games — briefly seeming like an interloper in our home, but I don’t really remember a time before it arrived.
I do remember the installation of our broadband, which made me one of the few people in my social circle who didn’t have to hear the dreaded words, “Get off MSN Messenger, I have to make a phone call.”