This article was very interesting to me. I have long considered myself to be very tech savvy and many of the things in this article resonated with me. While I was never big into social media such as Facebook or twitter, I have had a long interest in gaming and it’s surrounding communities. The world of gaming has allowed me to build and maintain friendships with people, not only locally, but with people from around the country and even in other countries. Most of these people I have never met in real life, yet I feel close connection to them. This is an aspect that many people of an older generation do not understand and I think it is particularly interesting.
Besides forming new friendships with people from all over, my interest in gaming and other forms of social media has allowed me to maintain contact with friends from my original school district. In 7th grade I transferred from the Moon School District to the South Fayette School District. Through social media, I was able to maintain and reconnect with childhood friends that I might have not been able to in previous generations.
Being the “tech” expert in my household, I also felt a connection to the reading. In my family if there is a tech problem, I am usually the one who gets consulted. The majority of the technical knowledge that I have gained comes from my own outside research and interests beyond standard academics. In this way I felt a connection with the “Geeking Out” connection of the article. A recent example is how i built my own pc. I did this entirely with the help of the internet and tutorials found on YouTube.
Do any of you have similar experiences to mine and would you care to elaborate? I’m interested in other people’s thoughts on how the traditional age hierarchy of knowledge has broken down with the advancement of the digital age. Something that just came to mind was how the digital age has brought about new career opportunities. This might be a long shot question but, are any of you content creators on YouTube or other websites similar that or do you know anyone that is? I know that some people have been able to make full careers out of their content creation and only now are they starting to be considered as legitimate forms of employment.