(Future: Web Page Designer?)
Why I was afraid to take the Internet seriously as a kid and how that can change for kids today
I grew up as the Internet did. Even though I wasn’t fully aware of the implications, technology slowly began to enter the classroom. In 4th grade, we played the now legendary Slime Volleyball during indoor recess. The Internet was all fun and games. In 5th grade, the school administrators finally decided to install firewalls on the network after some young boys in the class across the hall from me pulled up Playboy’s website. Luckily, they didn’t manage to block Yahoo!’s music video channel. Ten years ago, the Internet was still this unknown void that my teachers didn’t understand and didn’t know what to do with.
But I thought the Internet was the best toy in the world.
So when elementary school yearbook time came around, I proudly wrote down my future job as “web page designer.” When the yearbooks were distributed and I saw what everyone else wrote, I rescinded my decision and made edits to at least one copy of the book. Why? I suspect that among jobs like teacher and attorney, playing with this Internet toy just didn’t seem “respectable.”
Sometime around all then, after creating many GeoCities and FreeWebs pages, my mom was nice enough to humor me and purchase The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating an HTML 4 Web Page for me without really understanding what I would do with it.
I didn’t know what stylesheets were but I taught myself to become a ‘web page designer.’ In Junior High, I made MrMohawk.com for my friend Joe’s comics. By combining comics and websites, we were taken as seriously as Dilbert. At least weekly, Joe and I would go show the latest comic off to our Spanish teacher. He humored us and laughed but then told us to aprende más español. My teachers were not quick to embrace the Internet, and it hurt.
I never had an adult mentor to help cultivate this new passion. So I moved on to more respectable hobbies (like video production) before coming full circle to user experience research and design in college. I missed out on many years of lost knowledge and experience. I never even considered computer science when I applied for colleges.
Today, things are different for kids and I envy them. Even the laggards have jumped on the Internet bandwagon and it’s far more integrated into education. I’ve spent time this past spring in an elementary school computer lab where teachers embrace technology. I have seen kids understand that, yes, the Internet is a playground but it’s also the most important knowledge base of our time. Teachers that were raised on encyclopedias are finally beginning to understand that Wikipedia can be a valid starting point for research. The students I observed even had their own school-friendly email address, were watching videos on SchoolTube and reading text on iPads. Thanks to initiatives like Scratch, Code.org and Girls Who Code, even programming is slowly but surely becoming a “respectable” career path among the younger generation.
But here’s my advice for adults (future me included): Support, educate and mentor children who want to explore innovative and rising fields. Don’t be so fast to write it off as novel. No one had any idea of the implications the Internet would have when it was first conceived. And for those who are in new or misunderstood industries, provide opportunities for students to learn and become involved. Being able to inspire and educate a new generation about what you do is a win-win situation for everyone.
I can’t imagine how many students gave up because a teacher didn’t take them seriously when they said they wanted to create a website. I can’t imagine how many students scribbled out their dream job in favor of something more traditional like attorney.
Don’t let a kid be embarrassed for embracing the unknown.
Jeff Stern is a nostalgic rising college senior. He writes this on the eve of a flight to California where he’ll spend the summer interning for a website called Google, a company he admired and wrote to back in the fifth grade.
Say hello on Twitter if you’d like: @jeff_stern.
