Whenever I visit my parents in New York and I happen to use one of their computers for anything, it suddenly becomes a funny situation. You could almost look at my house now and call it the “computer house” because downstairs, my mother has her own desk work area with her Apple computer that is hooked up to dial-up while my father has his own desk area on the other side of the den, which is hooked up to high speed. Finally, my brother has his laptop upstairs, which is hooked up to the wireless router. The last time I had to use my mother's computer because all of the other computers (mine included, which is a wireless laptop) were occupied, it was a nightmare.

It's funny and disturbing when you think about how spoiled we are as a community of Internet users. I can still remember a time when the Internet was brand new, back when there was only one computer in my house, and that computer was hooked up to the phone line. It took forever back then to connect to the Internet, but what did we know? Now, I get frustrated-angry even- if a page I'm trying to look at on the Internet doesn't load at warp speed. I must have sat at my mother's computer for at total of one minute just waiting for it to turn on before I became too agitated to wait any longer. Computers are simply faster all around now compared to how they were years ago.

At my grandmother's apartment, she has tried out this whole “Internet” thing, but uses something called Web TV. Web TV is almost as bad as dial-up..maybe even worse. When I am at my grandmother's apartment, I cannot get an Internet connection unless I sit down in her rocking chair and attempt to use this WebTV contraption. Web TV is a type of Internet service in which you connect to the Internet through your cable line. And while it is not technically the same thing as dial-up, it is just as slow. My grandmother, though, is used to the slow speed at which her Internet service operates. Perhaps that's it then- perhaps the rest of us have simply become so accustomed to the Internet evolution that we failed to notice how the pace has changed over the years. The fact of the matter is that if you think about it- the Internet really hasn't been around terribly long!

Look at the iPod or pretty much any other gadget. My mother and I share a family plan for our phones in which we can opt to purchase a new phone every year (or upgrade). When I first got a cell phone, I didn't think I would need to upgrade or switch my phone after a year. I just figured I would hang onto it until it broke or something happened to it. However, I found myself getting caught up in the technology craze that has since swept the nation. It's no longer about having a phone purely for function. Rather, it's about having a certain kind of phone because of the way it looks, the ring tones it has and/or the way it looks.