The Weird of Oz Talks to a Troll
I got onto the World Wide Web relatively late in the game. Prior to 1999, I was still pounding away on a Brother word processor. It could play Tetris (all the shapes were a single color, orange, against a black screen). Connect to the Web it could not.
Then I got my first computer, modem, and dial-up service — just in time to enjoy the Y2K panic when we collectively feared our computers would crash and wipe out all our precious data as a special New Year’s Day surprise. That never came to pass; in fact, I still have a few old files from that floppy-disc-devouring dinosaur, dutifully transferred from one upgrade to another down the years. Though if I open them now, converting them from an ancient version of Wordperfect to Word 2007, the original text appears far down the page, embedded within dozens of lines of incoherent symbols, as if a foreword and postscript had been attached to my musings by an alien intelligence in an unknown tongue.
Most of us can probably recall what it was like when we first discovered the new vistas that were suddenly opened to us…The novelty of typing anything into a search engine and marveling at the thousands of possibilities that came cascading in response to our command. Text, visuals, audio, video — why, images moved and made noises on the virtual page before us! We were transformed into wizards, able to summon erudite knowledge or time-killing trifles (far too often the latter) with such ease that Prospero himself would be envious, and indeed might be tempted to trade in Ariel for a Dell.
I’m secretly haunting an 8th grade English class at Hammarskjold Middle School. I tutor some students who are in the same class, so I get to see their teacher’s assignments, comments on student writing, and most recently, study guides for midterm exams. I glimpse the teacher through the fog of my physical absence from the classroom–I even forget from week to week whether the teacher is a man or a woman–but traces of my spectral influence may be detectable in my students’ work.
