Internet

I'm old enough to remember having to be a responsible adult while having no internet.  By the time I became a mom, the internet was around, but not nearly in the sense it is now.

It's both a blessing and a curse, and I don't feel I need to drone on about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the internet.  It has certainly made life easier and also introduced dangerous and/or antisocial and/or just plain annoying behaviors.

Then there's shopping.  Shopping was a big deal when I was younger.  Growing up in a small town, we didn't have many fancy stores, and nothing even resembling a mall.  About once a month, my family would load up the car and we'd make a day trip for shopping.  As a teenaged girl with disposable income, I relished those trips.

Now, I don't much enjoy shopping.  I'm thankful I can just surf online for what I need, shop around for the best price, read user reviews, and have the thing arrive at my doorstep in a couple of days.  All this while watching several brick-and-mortar stores go out of business.

But I wonder about our kids.  Meego decides he needs/wants something, looks for it online, asks me if he can order it, places the order.  He has it a couple of days later.  Does he appreciate it as much as I appreciated the things I thought about for a month or so before buying? It often prompts me to launch into one of my "Back when I was your age..." soliloquys.

This week's prompt at Illustration Friday is "internet".  I don't have an actual shopping cart key on my keyboard... not literally.  But figuratively, oh yeah.  So I drew this the old fashioned way - with a pencil and paper.  While doing so, I streamed a movie online.  Then uploaded the sketch.  Onto the internet.