I walk a very fine generational line, being an early (older) member of Gen X.
For many years, though, my admiration of new tech was tempered with poverty. My father’s first heart was in 1971, when I was (and when he was only 28). And although his career in data processing for Eastern Savings Bank in the Bronx was meteoric—he was a vice president at age 30—repeated heart attacks and terrible surgeries gave his employers pause. My father was forced to resign with neither a pension nor insurance in 1977, making the three years until his death in 1980 a time of reliance on kind friends and relatives. The game, above, was a gift from a parish priest, for example, designed to distract my younger brother and I.
I was in eighth grade when my father died, and once I began high school, continuing as a scholarship student at a private school predominantly favored by Rockland County’s wealthier families, my awareness of my poverty deepened. My mother’s remarriage in 1981 helped, but I wanted more than an allowance. I wanted freedom to buy tech.
I worked at summer camps, at movie theaters, for the balloon lady (my mother’s nickname for Mrs. Monk, an entrepreneur who designed balloon decorations for bar mitzvahs and weddings). I spent some money on important teen things like clothes, but I saved, too.
During my junior year (1982–1983), the computing bug bit. I learned to program on an Apple IIe at school, and took the first-ever Computer Science AP exam as a senior. But the IIe was clunky, and in 1984, Apple released two new computers. I didn’t see the point of the Macintosh (although I regretted that ignorance when I arrived at the computer labs in college) and instead bought the very cute (and somewhat portable) Apple IIc.
I worked at college, too, in the library, reshelving books, and saved money for a Macintosh Plus in 1986. Only $1600! I brought that Mac with me to Japan, complete with a giant 45MB hard drive and a modem.
In Japan, it took a few years to find the gay BBS, but by 1990 I was dialed in nearly every night (after the phone rates went down). I upgraded to one of the pizza-box Macs in 1994, with a color monitor even, and used it for freelance translation and design work when I moved into Tōkyō that year.
The Internet exploded when I was still in Japan, and online shopping was a fantastic way to get books in English without paying the Kinokuniya markups. This was when Amazon rewarded its customers, not only with a working search feature that didn’t cram irrelevant ads down your throat, but also with thank-you gifts. I still have the mousepad, adorned with a Groucho Marx reference: Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
When it came to social media, however, I was not an early adopter. I dabbled with the online communities created by Apple and AOL but they were boring. I briefly had a MySpace page but I didn’t give in to peer pressure to join Facebook until 2008, at which point I was living in Canada to give Hiro a break from the student visa hell he’d endured in the US for me.
I never really saw the point of Twitter, to be honest, until the mid-2010s. Hiro, however, used it all the time and mocking each other for our respective choices (I was on Facebook a LOT and he was always on Twitter) became habit for a few years.
When I started writing in 2020, however, I reassessed. I liked the pre-Elmo version of Twitter as I started making virtual friends, nearly all of whom were fellow writers.
Sometimes the notion of platform came up during the many writing seminars I took to improve my skills. I made the rookie mistake of thinking platform equalled the number of followers, but thankfully wiser souls, like Allison K. Williams and Jane Friedman helped me rethink that.
Not that I have shied away from Twitter (I’m there as @iambrianwatson), but I’m beginning to see trends in the way I use it. I follow and support my friends. I get notifications from authors I admire and sometimes get to interact with them in meaningful ways. Having a certain essayist (someone I admire yet have never met) tell me that they love me (after I shared an excerpt from one of her essays and amplified her experience as another Gen X queer person) still makes me cry (happy tears).
But I see other friends and authors do something I could never bring myself to do. Forced engagement.
One author friend, someone I like a great deal, spends hours (it seems) online each day posing questions. I don’t get the sense that they are connected to his writing—I certainly ask questions to clarify the idioms I use in my writing, for example. My gut tells me that he wants that engagement, even on the mundane.
I suppose it works for him. He was ten times as many followers as I do (and he joined Twitter as a writer three years before I did, too). And maybe someday I’ll follow his lead.
But for now I want my engagement to be smaller in scale. To truly connect with people in my communities that I care about.
And that’s exactly what I hope for my memoir.
