My Fear: Decoded
I have always considered myself to be fearless.
I have jumped from an airplane, been white water rafting, climbed the Sydney Harbor Bridge, gotten acupuncture, eaten exotic foods that would be more appropriate on Fear Factor than on a dinner plate, zip-lined over 500 ft tall canopies and taken organic chemistry (perhaps scariest one of them all).
I may not be up there with Johnny Knoxville during his Jackass days, but there really are not that many things that I’m afraid of.
But as ridiculous as it sounds, I am afraid of computers.
Yes, I tote a mini computer as a cell phone; yes, my laptop computer is always glued to my side; yes, I live in a world where computers are responsible for most of the stimuli I perceive. (Thankfully, I don’t walk around in a cold sweat, frozen in fear of all my belongings.)
I think a better way of putting it is that I have a tendency to be afraid of things I don’t understand.
I readily use the technology every moment of every day and yet I don’t know how exactly it works and I don’t know how to harness it to my own liking. I sometimes feel it’s more in control of me, than I am of it. (Did you mean to spend 20 minutes of Facebook, or did you just get sucked in?)
Let me put it this way, we were taught how to read when we were kids. We can comfortably handle all the books, street signs, food labels, etc. that we encounter on a daily basis.
We were taught how to speak. We can comfortably handle conversations with different people and have learned to tailor them to various situations — whether they are casual with a friend, formal for a speech, professional with an adult, etc. (Some people have a tough time with this one at, say, the bars in Midtown.)
Basically, we have been taught the baseline skills that we need to employ on a daily basis to navigate the world we live in. We read, write and speak every single day.
But don’t we also use computers?
Have we reached the point where learning the language of computers is just as important a skill as other forms of communication? In a world where technology is progressing at an exponential rate and computers are being integrated more and more thoroughly into our lives, learning codes might be the key to navigating the ever-advancing digital age.
It’s awkward encountering someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you. You struggle to engage and can only find common ground on very simple terms. It’s very difficult to find out what that person is truly about or realize the extent to which you two could connect. It is a very surface level interaction.
It is the same with the coding of computers. How much more of a rich and powerful experience would you have if you could speak the same language as the devices you use every single day?
You can harness the power of human language to connect, persuade, and inspire people; if you could harness the power of computer language you can create, design, and spread your ideas instantly to the world.
On my bucket list (saved in my tiny, scary iPhone computer, of course) there are endless adventures that require me to be fearless in the future. Before “ride an ostrich in South Africa” and after “bungee jump from the Royal Gorge Bridge,” I’ve added “take a computer coding class.”
Much like the free fall from a sky-dive, being immersed in the world of computers is exciting, insanely fast, and kind of a blur. But when the parachute deploys, you get a moment to think, appreciate the beauty around you, and instead of hurtling towards the earth uncontrolled, you get to guide yourself however you’d like in the decent.
Perhaps learning coding is deploying your parachute.
