TOWARD THE BACK of my top dresser drawer—the one for pajamas—I have an iPhone 4 in a lime-green case. I bought this now-obsolete phone, refurbished, years ago, as a gift for my son on his 11th birthday. But it was never charged, never turned on, never brought blazing to life as I hoped it would be: with group texts, Instagram, Super Stickman Golf.

So the phone sits among my nightgowns, essentially deceased. I only recently acknowledged that it will never be what a phone should be—someone’s steadfast companion, a guilty pleasure, a fetish object alive with the hallucinatory wonders of the entire angelic and demonic internet.

What happened is my son rejected my gift. He simply said no to the present I’d bought and wrapped for him.

He didn’t want a phone. He really didn’t want a phone. As I protested that he need use it only for calls and texts, he dug in, and became emotional. Please don’t make me get a phone. So I tucked the iPhone 4 in my drawer, assuming he’d come around. Three years later, he still hasn’t.

Some of his resistance to digital culture is no doubt a reaction to my outsize embrace of it. When I was nine, in the earliest days of the internet, my family bought a terminal that could dial in to a spectacular, heaving mainframe belonging to Dartmouth College, in the center of Hanover, New Hampshire. The green letters on the black background mesmerized me, as did the crash and squeal of the modem.

My early experience of computing was pure romance. Even dialing the numbers on our rotary phone made my heart pound; forget about pressing the receiver into the acoustic coupler. When words came on the screen, I felt as if all the ideas in the world were being crushed through copper wire in my family’s house in the woods, where they were now right at my fingertips. I could feel worldly just sitting in my bedroom.

Throughout middle school, I played online adventure games—many with a social element—for hours on end. I used the handle Athena. I made friends with an excellent crew of hackers, CB aficionados, metalheads, tech-curious athletes, and X-Men obsessives. Those early experiences with computers opened my imagination to new realms. They introduced me to a vast range of other minds. And they taught me the awesomely flexible and playful idiom I still encounter on Twitter.