"Hey, Dad. You would have really loved Facebook."
My late father-in-law, John Cronin, was a man very much ahead of his time. Born in 1921, I started dating his daughter when he was 48. I thought he was old, of course. After all, he was a father of nine children and he looked (and was) tired all the time. A high school teacher, he taught sociology. I thought he was the coolest guy his age I'd ever met.
We'd sit for hours, usually in the twilight hours as I waited in the living room for my date to come down from her room, ready I hoped to leave for the movies. While I sat with him, Dad (though I called him Mister Cronin then) and I would talk about school, my schooling in particular, and what I planned to major in college. "Mass media," I'd say, and he'd then tell me about Marshall McLuhan and the global village.
"Wouldn't it be neat (his favorite word) one day if you could access computers somehow from all over the world and read information shared on those computers?" he asked me once. Then we went on to discuss a wired-world where freely sharing between anyone "connected" to this phantom network could do research on term papers, or research of any kind.
We didn't know it then but Dad was actually describing the Internet and the World Wide Web. These conversations happened regularly for about four years, until the day I asked his his permission to marry his daughter. His reply? "It's about time."
Dad would have loved Facebook. He died in 2004, so he was able to see the birth and growth of the information highway. But remarkably his enthusiasm for it wasn't as high as I assumed it may have been. I assumed it was just because he just didn't have time for it, spending almost all his waking hours devoted to charity work, helping those less fortunate than him.
But I'm convinced he would have loved social networking, since that's what he was, a sociologist. He would have observed it with much interest, and we would have devoted many hours to discussing its use and how it affected people interacting with each other.
He loved expressing his opinion and loved sticking up for the underdog, against the bully, championing the rights of the common man. When I told him one day that our junior college was going to start a student paper to act as an open voice for the student body he loved the idea. I told him of my desire to write a column that would comment on the daily goings on, observing the wrongs and rights of the tumultuous times.
We thought the op-ed feature we be the most fun if we patterned it after a couple of Dad's writing heroes--Mike Royko and Studs Terkel. We played around with pen names as we felt that the anonymity we wanted the author (me) to have was critical to my ability to write and express freely what was going on at the time on college campuses all over the country.
But this column would take on the voice of the commuter college student, living, working, and studying in the City of Chicago. That voice became Brad Nelson.
So in honor of my father-in-law and his love of the Internet and the world wide web, where here more than ever the medium is the message, Brad Nelson has been resurrected. Thanks, Dad. I'm sure you're in heaven online, typing away on your PC because I know you're not a Mac guy.
We'd sit for hours, usually in the twilight hours as I waited in the living room for my date to come down from her room, ready I hoped to leave for the movies. While I sat with him, Dad (though I called him Mister Cronin then) and I would talk about school, my schooling in particular, and what I planned to major in college. "Mass media," I'd say, and he'd then tell me about Marshall McLuhan and the global village.
"Wouldn't it be neat (his favorite word) one day if you could access computers somehow from all over the world and read information shared on those computers?" he asked me once. Then we went on to discuss a wired-world where freely sharing between anyone "connected" to this phantom network could do research on term papers, or research of any kind.
We didn't know it then but Dad was actually describing the Internet and the World Wide Web. These conversations happened regularly for about four years, until the day I asked his his permission to marry his daughter. His reply? "It's about time."
Dad would have loved Facebook. He died in 2004, so he was able to see the birth and growth of the information highway. But remarkably his enthusiasm for it wasn't as high as I assumed it may have been. I assumed it was just because he just didn't have time for it, spending almost all his waking hours devoted to charity work, helping those less fortunate than him.
But I'm convinced he would have loved social networking, since that's what he was, a sociologist. He would have observed it with much interest, and we would have devoted many hours to discussing its use and how it affected people interacting with each other.
He loved expressing his opinion and loved sticking up for the underdog, against the bully, championing the rights of the common man. When I told him one day that our junior college was going to start a student paper to act as an open voice for the student body he loved the idea. I told him of my desire to write a column that would comment on the daily goings on, observing the wrongs and rights of the tumultuous times.
We thought the op-ed feature we be the most fun if we patterned it after a couple of Dad's writing heroes--Mike Royko and Studs Terkel. We played around with pen names as we felt that the anonymity we wanted the author (me) to have was critical to my ability to write and express freely what was going on at the time on college campuses all over the country.
But this column would take on the voice of the commuter college student, living, working, and studying in the City of Chicago. That voice became Brad Nelson.
So in honor of my father-in-law and his love of the Internet and the world wide web, where here more than ever the medium is the message, Brad Nelson has been resurrected. Thanks, Dad. I'm sure you're in heaven online, typing away on your PC because I know you're not a Mac guy.
No comments have been added yet.
