In retrospect, the 90’s really was the defining point of the tech generation. With the advent of the Macintosh and the original Windows, for the first time since the dawn of computing, anyone with the will to do so and a pile of money could own and operate a computer. Parents bought them for their kids to do homework. Working adults bought them to work from home. And everyone wanted to talk tech.

By 1992, the first CD-Roms were just coming into common use. Floppy disks grew on trees and looked just like those little square data devices from Star Trek. RAM was $150 bucks for 4 megs, a far cry from the 1Gb for 60 bucks in todays economy. And Egghead Software was still a word used in common vernacular. Thus began the age of the personal computer.

From the dawning of the personal computer was born a new dialect. Conversations about ones hard drive or how many Mhz their computer could go were just sex to anyone within earshot of the water cooler. The internet livened things up even more, introducing: chat, email, online dating, movies, games and porn to a generation of men and women looking for an instant fix, opening the way to a “cool” lifestyle. Online gaming such as Quake, Everquest, and eventually World of Warcraft brought people closer together, even as they got farther apart. Gaming addiction and porn were claimed to lead to decreased social interaction, eating disorders, and an increase in the failure of the institution of marriage. Video games were cited as causing anti-social behavior, just as books and music had done before them. The ultimate example of which took place at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, where a group of anti-social teenagers killed several of their classmates in a style reminiscent of a first person shooter. All in all, peoples lives became more and more intermingled with technology, and technology in turn ruled their environment.

As time went by, computers became more portable; wireless networks became all the rage to the modern college student and working adult looking to use their computer in an increasing variety of venues. Restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and hotels began to integrate wi-fi into their business models. Further, computers and cell phones were smaller and lighter than ever before and could process more information than a super computer from a decade earlier; plus, they were beginning to be disposable…when you were done with it, you could throw it away.

By the end of the 90’s and the beginning of the 2000’s, prices had dropped, and computers were available to everyone, not just middle class adults. Computer tech was getting cheaper to produce and was appearing everywhere from your wrist watch, to kids toys, to your blender. This paved the way for broader acceptance, and ultimately America had a computer in every household mentality. Everything was easier, faster, cheaper, better…and to reiterate the point again…it was disposable, disposable, disposable…

Okay, so once technology became disposable, it simply stopped. Not stopped exactly, but it became so much a part of the pop culture; it became so iconoclastic, that technology ceased to exist as a separate entity and just became…well, “it.”

It could go anywhere, it could do anything. It could swing polls, start and end wars, send a kid off to college or open a restaurant to rave reviews. With “it,” you were negotiating with social credit, and not just tech. This was a step in the right direction, because “it” was what ultimately brought people back together. Now it was about the interaction and how people could bump into one another. From this idea, Internet 2.0 was created. With sites such as Ebay, Wikipedia, Second Life, MySpace, and Youtube, the users could control the content and others could interact with it.

For the first time, people could go anywhere, be with people, surf the net, have complete control over their environment, and completely ignore technology all at the same time.