My First Memory of the Digital

My younger brother Szymon turned thirteen this year. As an older sister who grew up in a time when access to the digital world was incomparably more limited than today, I find it fascinating to observe the differences in our first experiences with technology. I must admit I also feel slightly jealous of the fact that our parents allow him so much freedom on the internet while what I did online used to be heavily restricted and controlled resulting in my constant feeling of missing out. I was permitted to create my Facebook account at the age of thirteen and although it is the number that the platform suggests as a minimum age for users, all my friends had owned an account way before me. Szymon on the other hand has been scrolling on TikTok and Instagram for a good couple of years already. So where is the justice?

On the other hand, there is something comforting in knowing that the majority of my early childhood years were spent without smartphones or social media and that my first encounters with technology were therefore not only more exciting but safer at the same time. I remember how much joy it would bring me to stay in my grandparents’ house after school playing solitaire on my grandfather’s old PC while waiting for my mom to pick me up. Although the game might not seem particularly fun for a child and I doubt I really understood it at that age, I had a great time because the actions of clicking and moving elements on the screen were entertaining by themselves. Alternatively, I played a game called ‘Chicken Shoot’ which as the name suggests focused on shooting chickens as quickly as possible as they were flying across the screen. Sometimes during weekends, my mom would bring her huge, fat, work laptop home and I could surf the internet for an hour or so. My favorite type of online activity was playing dress-up games which immersed me completely and made me feel like an actual stylist. There were many variations of these games usually differing in themes or aesthetics but all of them inherently consisted of an image of a girl ready to be dressed in an outfit that I as a player needed to compose from an available selection of clothes, hairstyles, and accessories. By dragging items onto the model I could try out various looks until I found the one I liked. My mom’s laptop also offered another type of entertainment. Microsoft Paint was a program I frequently used and highly enjoyed. I have always loved drawing so doodling on the screen although not as precise as when using real pencils on paper was equally satisfying and provided a lot of possibilities for using my creativity.

While all of my early memories with the digital described so far are very pleasant and positive I still remember the first time I experienced the vastness of the internet. I realized how easy it is to find yourself in a place you don’t want to be and see things you shouldn’t. During one of our IT lessons in primary school, we got some free time to go online. I’m pretty sure that my friend and I decided to search for dolls we wanted to have and look at them in Google Images. Unfortunately, although we typed everything correctly a lot of… well, quite unexpected images appeared which I will not describe here in detail. Not only was I surprised to encounter that but I also felt a strange guilt for seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see. I can imagine that nowadays with such loose access online a lot of children have seen it all already and probably not much can shock them anymore. But doesn’t the beauty of childhood lie in not knowing?