I fire up my IBM 300 PL as soon as I arrive at work. It responds with a simple melody as it sputters to life and then greets me with a friendly network sign-on. I fill in my password, hit the enter key and soon after I am checking e-mail and surfing the Internet with an almost religious fervor. So imagine my dismay when I clicked-and-pointed my way to nytimes.com last week and read Thomas L. Friedman's piece 'Surfing Alone,' in which the columnist told how his experiences on book tour left him feeling that 'a backlash may be now brewing against all the technology hype now dominating our lives.'

Oh, give me a break. Perhaps a backlash against the new technology is brewing. But it's brewing among the same now-gloomy prognostications who created the hype--hook, line and IPO-sinker--in the first place. Sure, tech stocks have faltered in recent weeks, but why should we judge the whole industry on a few lousy months in 2000?

Just as I have matured from the chunky, braces-wearing adolescent who couldn't dress to save her life to an urban sophisticate schooled in the finer points of Prada shoes and Kate Spade knock-offs, so has the computer blossomed, from the clunky Apple IIe's on which I learned PASCAL coding in junior high to the DOS-based system, complete with dot matrix printer I worked on in high school, to the networked, fire-walled system I use today. And somewhere, in the midst of that process, the computer became an integral part of our lives. For members of my generation, who have grown up with the computer, using one now seems as natural a part of life as breathing. And so much more exciting.

What we understand is that anyone who suggests that our lives (and, by extension, our checkbooks) will be transformed by the new technology hasn't been paying attention. It's not that our lives will be transformed; it's that they were, a long time ago. Computers are everywhere, regulating my car, my Palm Pilot, my cell phone, my oven-heck, even the sprinklers in my garden. All of these instruments make my life easier.

We delight in watching the Internet expand at a mind-numbing rate-I read recently that one in five Web pages is 11 days old or younger and half of the Web's content is younger than three months. We have found there things we would never dream of being able to access so readily. A small example: When, in 1918, my paternal grandfather left the island in Italy where he was born, his family feared they would never see him again. They were right; his parents had been dead more than 30 years when he made his only trip back to the island, in 1967, five years before I was born. Today, at any time I choose, I can sign on to the Internet and, from the comfort of my living room, watch a Web site broadcast instantaneous pictures and news from the island. How, I ask, is this bad?

Finding phone numbers, getting driving directions, checking flight arrival times-all of these tasks are more easily done on line. And we expect that information to be there, to be readily accessible. I use the Internet to learn about new books on sites like Amazon.com and vromansbookstore.com (my local independent bookseller); I pay my American Express bill www.americanexpress.com at 11 p.m.; I find cycling teams in the Netherlands for my husband, who will travel there next month; I download a new song that I don't have time to go the store to buy. Sure, there are times when the connection is down or a server is slow or even offline. But that's a stumble along the path, not a failure of technology.

'Technology is making life more complicated, not less,' Friedman wrote. But ever spend precious minutes spelling a last name three times to an operator, or find yourself in an endless loop on MovieFone, futilely pounding the buttons of your requisite touch-tone phone? In so many cases, it's easier to go online. And, perhaps more important, it's more natural. I need information; I get it. Why do I need a human intermediary to do it for me?

Sure, there are businesses, and careers, that will fall by the wayside in the midst of this changing world. But so many others will be enhanced. There are countless examples of companies that understand why it's necessary to become a player online and are keeping up with the Joneses. Their futures, no doubt, will be brighter because of it.

It's also been suggested that the new technology is faltering because it fails to serve as a proper substitute for human contact. That's the wrong way to think about these issues. The new technology has enabled our ability to communicate rather than limited it. I hear from friends more frequently than I did 5, even 10 years ago; much of this has to do with the simplicity with which they can compose a letter, send it, and expect a response in hours rather than days. How, I ask, does this limit my horizon?

The naysayers who question our reliance on the computer, our infatuation with its possibilities, don't understand what members of my generation, who have grown up with the computer, seem to understand instinctively. It's a process, folks.