Here's My Media Bio

My first encounter with TV was in a crowded living room in Jersey City in about 1954. Neighbors of my grandmother had purchased a TV and the whole neighborhood had crammed into their living room to watch. We sat in the dark and stared at a screen about 8" x 8". I don't remember what we watched, some kind of a variety show. I thought it was weird.

My family got our first TV a year or two later. It was a green plastic cube with a 20" screen that sat on black tubular metal legs like a bug. We had to rearrange the furniture to find a place for it. It got three b&w channels from Cleveland and those channels signed on around 6 am and off around midnight to be replaced by a test pattern. A few years later my family upgraded to a console model that looked more like furniture, but it was still a B&W model. We didn't get a color set until I was in high school.

My father's radio was a brown plastic model about the size of a wide shoebox. It stayed in the kitchen and was for listening to news and baseball. It got AM and shortwave. When I think of it, I think of the local radio station WLEW and Herb Score announcing for the Indians.

I became a radio owner in the 1960's when I got a transistor radio about the size of a small paperback book. Through it I discovered the wonders of Motown and CKLW. I had a small record player on which I spun Top 40 45's. In high school I bought a stereo for $80 (most of my savings from my summer job) and started buying  LPs. In a few years I went from the Beach Boys and the Supremes to Jefferson Airplane and Bob Dylan.

The stereo went with me to college. In college, my friends had stereos with component parts and their cars had 8-track tapes. FM radio came out and carried more "alternative" music. Music became our entertainment of choice. Each residence hall floor had a TV room where everyone watched together. I didn't own a TV of my own until 3 years later when I got married and moved to San Francisco.

When I went back to college in the mid-1970's, I had my first contact with computers. At BGSU I took programming courses in Basic, Fortran, and Cobal by standing in line at the mainframe lab and loading in boxes of punch cards. You could tell how involved someone's program was by the size of their card box. After having my program loaded, I checked the time and came back later to find out the results. Usually I was handed a bunch of big green and white striped sheets noting all my errors line by line. Then I started again.

A few years later, computer labs appeared on campus and I could sit at a console linked to the mainframe. Most of the word processing I did was controlled by DOS commands. By the early 80's I could also go to the basement of the computer science building and log on to listservs on various subjects and talk to people all over the world with similar interests. PC's appeared on the scene soon after.

By the mid-80's we had a Heathkit 64K computer at home that my techie husband had built out of parts he ordered from a catalog. He used it mostly for games. It used big paper floppy discs. Within a few more years I had an Apple PC. It still used big paper floppies but now I didn't have to know DOS. I taught writing in my first computer classroom at Findlay College.

By the early 90's I had a PC that ran some form of Windows. It used small plastic floppies. I had the Internet at home through a dial-up phone line, I had a cell phone that was in a shoulder bag and had an antenna for the top of my car. By the end of the 90's my husband and kids also had cell phones.

Since then both my computers and cell phones have gotten smaller, more powerful, and more portable. I've added an I-pod and gotten rid of my land line and my desktop computer. I IM my daughter at work in Philadelphia through FB and wake-up from the alarm on my phone. And I am still not as integrated into the digital world as my kids because for me it is always an add-on. For me, media is a tool, for them it is the sea in which they swim.