Using the computer mouse, I clicked on an arrow icon. A new window popped open. I saw the picture of a beautiful, dew-kissed strawberry and heard a woman’s pleasant voice saying, “Oh, look! A strawberry.”

In slide projector style, the picture changed to a slightly shriveled strawberry. The pleasant woman’s voice slurred, “Oh, look! A strawberry!” The next picture was of a strawberry starting to mold. The woman could barely enunciate the familiar words. Finally, there was the picture of a strawberry in the process of becoming a gooey puddle. The woman only made a few feeble sounds. It was as if her tongue had turned into wood.

Frowning, I wondered, “Was this meme showing the effects of a stroke?” Having worked all my working years in a hospital, I would have instantly called for a nurse if I saw this happening to a patient! When I asked my daughter about it, she laughed and assured me the meme was just putting a voice to things deteriorating. In the days that followed, I noticed that similar memes used the same words, but instead of rotting strawberries, they showed progressively uglier dogs or cats.

My skill in navigating modern technology is growing. However, there is so much about online culture that I will never understand. Also dampening my growing pride in my tech skill is the realization that my skill is very elementary: it could be compared to a baby’s first, wobbling steps. Most ten-year-olds today have more tech savvy than I will ever have.

When my mother, who was born in 1906, died, my children and I marveled at all the changes in daily living she experienced.  It seemed that she had been born during a long-a-go, primitive age. It was a time when people used horse and carriages to go places, when there was no electricity in the countryside, so people used kerosine lamps for light, and wood stoves for heat. Mom was an adult before airplane travel became common and she lived long enough to see astronauts land on the moon and computers become as common as televisions.

I consider 1950, when I was born, a modern, high-tech age. After all, by then most homes had indoor bathrooms and electricity. Every farm family I knew owned cars. Eventually, even my family owned a television.  Our small-town high school even had a few electric typewriters for students to use.  The advent of computers was still only a whispered rumor that not everyone believed, and sometimes even laughed about.

Today’s generation will look back at the year of my birth, 1950, the way I looked back at the year of my mother’s birth. They will ask, “How did people manage to live in such primitive conditions?”

Living in the modern world requires learning newly coined words that describe modern technology. Figuring out what these unfamiliar terms mean has been hard. Navigating around the internet is easier. Recently, I’ve been struggling with the words emoji, GIF, and meme.

Emojis are the little smile faces that differ by showing various emotions. They have only been around since the late 1990’s and people often add them to messages to emphasize a specific emotion. Caution needs to be taken if you do not know what each emoji means. The little yellow face winking is not as innocent as I thought. It appears I’ve been flirting with people!

GIF sounds like gift, but without the T. It is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format and was introduced in 1987 by CompuServe for compressed, often animated, images. GIFs are often sent with messages like emoji’s but are always in a specific format, animated or short-looped images.

Meme is pronounced “meem”. Memes may utilize GIFs as their medium to convey a culturally relevant message or joke. Any image, whether static or animated, can serve as a meme.

The other day I complained to my daughter, “I still don’t like the, “Oh, look!” meme. Are you sure the woman in it isn’t having a stroke?” Tammie just sighed and shook her head. I continued to grumble. “It just might be my 1950 style sense of humor, but I don’t get what people find funny about something that’s deteriorating.”