Enthusiasts tend to point toward a lifelong interest in technology that started at an early age, oftentimes with encouragement from their family members and older friends to explore technologies. Enthusiasts of this generation were the kids who often took apart their televisions, created kit radios, and modified their cars. When asked about their relationship with ICTs, they often share vivid
memories from childhood about encountering a new technology for the first time. For instance, Fred spoke about hisfirst encounter with television:
I remember thefirst TV I saw […] it was a little TV screen, in a big box. It was black and white. In the Fifties there were only three channels in my city. After 11:30 at night the only thing on was a test pattern. That was the early Fifties. It was amazing and so nobody on our street had a TV. And then the one kid I hung around with on the street their family got a TV. We’d go down there and watch TV and they had thefights on Friday and that was about it. But it was amazing. Later they had movies on TV, you could watch the news […] it was great! (Fred)
While Fred speaks about how limited early television was (with only the fights broadcast on Fridays), he also speaks in terms of amazement and enthusi-asm. In their descriptions, Enthusiasts focus on the technology itself and their personal relationship with it. While other types see technology as being a tool to get something done or a connector between people, Enthusiasts think using tech-nology (even for mundane tasks) is simply fun play. In childhood, this fascina-tion was often encouraged by those around the Enthusiast. In particular, Enthusiasts were encouraged to “tinker,” to take technologies apart and put them back together:
My father was a mathematician engineer and he was career Army. He was into technology and electronics, so he would come home and bring radios and all kinds of stuff. So, I guess from the time I was a kid there was stuff around to play with. He would let me play with anything he brought home, and I just got into it.
I’ve always just had this thing for playing with technology. (Fred) Fred speaks about how his father was instrumental in his early love of tech-nology by encouraging him to“play”with new gadgets. Similarly, Harry speaks about his grandfather, who tended to be on the leading edge of technologies and who let Harry play with his shortwave technology and other things that were available in his service department:
My grandfather ran the service department at a car dealership in the 1920s. My grandfather was an early adopter of technology and I grew up and around his shop. So, I think I grew up with the love of technology. My grandfather was always messing with new things. There was a shortwave radio that was my granddad’s and it was a Zenith which in the 1950s was an equivalent of the iPod. I always used it in his office and when he passed away I got the radio. So, I grew up in a technical environment, around cars being fixed and electronics. I was interested in electronics when
I was a kid. My grandfather was thefirst kind of direct influence, and I don’t really think anybody in particular really matched his influence on me. I got into ham radio in the Boy Scouts and I built a ham radio from a kit and did ham radio stuff and I really think that is because of my grandfather’s encouragement.
(Harry)
Enthusiasts, unlike other types, tend to be able to point to one person who has been pivotal in their journey with technology, resulting in the development of what has become a lifelong love affair with“things with plugs”(Alice). Harry could point to his grandfather as being the most influential person in his rela-tionship with technology, while Fred pointed toward his father. At times, these relationships could be quite fragile due to other factors, but the love of technol-ogy helped to maintain a connection. Fred shared that his relationship with his father was strained as Fred had chosen the career path of a teacher and an artist (and later an IT professional) rather than an engineer, as his father had wanted.
However, throughout their relationship, they could always find a common ground over technology.
As Enthusiasts grow older, their “toys” tend to become bigger. Male Enthusiasts often turned toward “hot rodding” their cars by adding speakers and trying to make them faster:
I was alsofiddling in high school and college with car radios try-ing to beef up my car radio to make it not one speaker like they all had. I wantedfive speakers if I could put them in. I’ve always just had a thing about machinery. (Fred)
So, when I got out of the service I ended up going to college and I needed money. I gravitated towards cars, so I started selling cars for this little sports car dealership in a Midwest City. Some of the guys that were racing cars were having trouble keeping their cars running so I started making deals with them that I would rebuild their engine in return for being able to use their car to go through driver’s school. You had to go through four or six races in driver’s school and then you had to do six novice races. So, the deal was that I wouldfix their car and for racing weekend I would use it for the novice race and they would use it for the more advanced race, so it worked out pretty well. So, I ended up starting racing cars by working on them, Ifixed them and stuff. Then after college I won a major motor race and I went off on kind of this quixotic exercise of becoming a profes-sional racecar driver which didn’t work out. But in the course of it I got quite a reputation forfixing racing cars and then street cars, so I ended up with a car shop in a [North Eastern State].
I became the go to guy for exotic cars and stuff like that because
they required a little higher level of mechanical insight to do that… so I’ve always been interested in technology. Mechanics and technology. (Harry)
As Enthusiasts grow older, their interest in technology leads them to careers that often have a heavy technological focus. Enthusiasts see technology as being an important part of their career trajectory and often credit their love of technol-ogy as being the determining factor in their career choices. Harry, for instance, credits technology with“saving”him from becoming a delinquent, leading him instead on a career path to becoming an Information Technology (IT) professional:
I really thought that when I grew up I wanted to be an aeronauti-cal engineer. I didn’t have a real drive for it and so in a way tech-nology saved me […] I was a very bright student but I did not do well with authority. I had a lot of problems at home and I wasn’t quite a delinquent, but I probably wasn’t far from becoming one.
The reason I ended up in the Army was I wanted to be a pilot and no other service would take someone without a high school diploma. The Army said, “since you’re a little young for flight school you can go to helicopter mechanics school first.” So, I became a helicopter mechanic and in that time I ended up not going to flight school. I ended up realizing three years in the Army was going to be enough. So, I had a very vocational focus but a pretty high level education in both aircraft mechanics, structures, and in electronics for doing the systems and stuff like that. Then I went on to fix cars, because of my electronics and mechanical background […]
[Later] I started working in the physics lab. I’d always been inter-ested in electronics and stuff. I built radios as a kid and I had got-ten the electronics experience in the military. One of the reasons I got the job in the physics lab was being able to do electronics troubleshooting and maintenance; design and build power sup-plies, and stuff like that. That put me in touch with working on systems and that’s how I came to do IT systems work. (Harry)
While not all Enthusiasts become IT professionals, all the older adult IT pro-fessionals in this study were Enthusiasts, and all Enthusiasts choose to incorpo-rate heavy use of ICTs into their work lives. Alice, the only Lucky Few female Enthusiast in the study, had a slightly different journey with technology throughout her life. Alice was encouraged to be involved with technology from a young age, and in adulthood she chose to become a nurse, at one time working as a medical administrative assistant. While most would not see technology tak-ing a central point in this type of work, Alice noted that she often “pushed”
technology in her workplace to be as efficient and effective as possible, even early in her career:
Many years ago, I was a nurse secretary in a big office. I had an electronic typewriter, which I programmed as much as I could. It made my job so much easier and efficient. When I left that office, there was one secretary who was really a bitch and she said“oh when you leave I’d love to have your computer your type-writer!”I said,“oh sure!”I brought it into her and I said,“Here’s my typewriter,”and what she didn’t know is that I had erased all the programs I had put on there. I knew that she couldn’t figure that out. I’ve always pushed the technology to make it work for me. (Alice)
While most of the administrative assistants Alice worked with did not spend time programming their typewriters, she spent extensive time researching and finding out how she could program various shortcuts into the system. Alice greatly enjoyed this task, as well as how it benefited her during her work.