Daywalker

I'd like to think I was born lucky.

Born in 1979, I straddle the line between "Generation X" and "the Millenials." I'm young enough to understand and use modern technology. Computers are far from alien to me. They're second nature, just as they are for most young Americans.

On the other hand, I'm young enough to recall when this technology was "new," and appreciate it even more because of that. I remember an age before TIVO, mobile phones and the world wide web.

Luckier than that, I was born into a tech-savvy household long before computers were the "in" thing. My parents brought home the alien-looking typewriter when I was barely in kindergarten. It was a TI-99 with a speech synthesizer. It wasn't just a computer - it could talk. Even as a tyke, I remember marveling at how futuristic it was.

The TI would soon give way to a Commodore 128. Admittedly my brother and I mostly used the computer as a game box, but we would dabble in other things. We wrote programs in BASIC. We used some of the earliest word processors. We drew pictures with a light pen in some of the early paint programs. Anything we wanted was just a floppy disk away.

I actually remember being told to take a typed report and hand-write it, because typing was "lazy." Those were the days.

As an engineer, my father would be the first to jump on a new piece of tech - if the price was right. Until the late 90's when the Internet spilled into the mainstream, we were always "ahead of the curve." Maybe I was considered a nerd in school, but I was the nerd going home to my awesome computer, thank you very much.

The combination of these two elements has been a boon in the past few years of college. I can connect with my "Baby Boomer" teachers and still hold conversations with "iGeneration" students. I can catch references to the Big Chill just as I can quote lines from web comics.

Journalism is going through a paradigm shift right now, and will be for the foreseeable future. The disciples of Edward Murrow are suddenly being confronted with "Web 2.0" reporters, speaking a new language. It's the age-old clash of old and new styles.

I'm beginning to think this is why people like me are in J-school. Maybe we're supposed to be the middle ground. As a "daywalker," I understand and respect the traditions and ethics of both ways. Traditional journalism built the very foundations that postmodern journalists now tread on. Maybe, just maybe, scrappy 30-somethings like me are the bridge between these two worlds.

Is this thinking too much of myself? Is this expecting too much of myself? I think about it often, and I honestly don't know. But the world's changing, the dust is going to settle, and someone will have to clean up the mess. I don't consider it presumptuous to have a broom ready.