What 'The Sopranos' taught me about technology

With “The Sopranos” TV series expected to have its last hurrah this Sunday at the Emmy Awards ceremony, it’s time to celebrate the HBO program’s most overlooked story line: Those thugs loved technology almost as much as they loved young women, good food, money and guns.

Naturally, the younger generation on the show – Tony and Carmela’s kids Meadow and A.J. – led the way.

Meadow arrived home late one night to find Tony drunk on wine, having barely survived an attempt on his life. He was all ready for a long talk, but she took the modern way out: “I gotta go online.”

Online is where she and A.J. also read up on dad and his activities outside of waste management. They pored through Web sites that showed the mafia hierarchy, a point not lost on Tony and his compatriots:

“It’s hard to raise kids in an information age. To protect them,” Tony’s consigliere Silvio Dante lamented in an episode during the first season.

Early on in the show, it was clear that Tony and Carmela still had a few things to learn about technology.

Coming home to a pile of snail mail one day, Carmela came across a handful of computer disks and said to her daughter: “Look at the money they waste on these CD-ROMS. Mindspring, EarthLink, what are these exactly?” (Though a couple of seasons later, Carmela seems caught up on technology, using a laptop computer to research financial portfolio information.)

During one of his therapy sessions with Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Tony shares with her that he is flummoxed at A.J.’s behavior of late. She says it sounds like his son has discovered existentialism, to which Tony replies: “[!@%$#%@] Internet.” But Melfi defends the 'Net, assuring him that existentialism is a European philosophy that was around long before the Web. Tony had an outburst during another session, expressing frustration and anger of automated voice-response systems that claim your call is important but don’t actually answer the phone.

Tony also seemed wowed that Svetlana, a young woman who took care of his mother and with whom he had a fling, was actually creating a Web site for her business from home.

Tony asked: “You know how to do that?”

Svetlana, pecking away on her Apple laptop computer: “I’m going to pay someone $35 an hour [to do it for me]?”

Sometimes, though, Tony seemed pretty up on technology. He proved handy with a practically surgically attached cell phone and also jumped on the flat-screen TVs trend, for instance.

And he once had to set his team straight about hacking. During this episode, Tony and the others were hanging around the grill at a barbecue when the subject of scamming airlines arose. “I always thought there was some way to divert frequent-flier mileage on a grand scale....” said Hesh Rabkin, one of Tony’s advisers. But another associate chimed in: “To do that you gotta break into the airlines’ main computer. What do they call it, crackin’?” Tony corrected him: “Hackin’”