My daughter is 6. She’s pretty smart. I don’t know if she is the smartest kid in her class but I tell her she is all the time.
Tonight she and I were talking and she told me something very cool.
“When you want to find something on the computer, you google it.“
I don’t know if a lot of people realize it, but Google has become so much more than a company we use to search the internet. When a company has gotten to the point in its brand identification that it is no longer a company, it’s a part of your vernacular… you’ve reached a plain reserved for a few companies in the world.
Coke. Play-Doh. Frisbee. Ping Pong. Things like this are not just brands… they are nouns.
Imagine this. Today’s 1st graders were born after 9-11-2001, may have never seen a house phone, and never used a computer without WiFi. And you don’t hear them say things like “Let’s see it on Yahoo.” or “Check it out on MSN.”
It’s really all about Google. Pretty soon we will say “The Goog” just like Ted Nugent fans say “The Nuge.” Well, maybe not that far.
We’ve come a long way from my first computer. It was a laptop, the Kaypro 2, and weighed about 90 pounds. I was pretty young when my mom’s boyfriend hooked this thing up. I remember it had a state of the art 1200 baud dial-up external modem and we dialed into the bulletin boards at Notre Dame. (Not sure why) So, you can see I’ve had my hands in computers for a long time. I hope/pray that my kids grow up with the opportunity to embrace technology through play like I did.
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