The Wonders of Technology

[precisonline]

This morning I've spent a few minutes chatting with friends and clients on both coasts and a few places between.  Here we all are, separated by thousands of miles and yet we can almost have real-time conversations in text.  While the technology that allows us to do this is nothing short of amazing, what I find to be even more so amazing is that we as a society now take this for granted and rarely think about the wonderful conveniences of current technology... unless something goes wrong, of course! 

Email zips around the globe and we hardly even give it a second thought after we hit 'Send'.  Skype allows us to communicate via voice with pretty amazing quality to anywhere a packet can reach.  And then of course who could forget Google Earth and now Google Streets?

All I'm saying is that we really should take a moment every now and again to revel in how far we as a society have come in our technology in the past few years.  And then, with full appreciation of where we've come from, we should continue to dream of where we're going.

[jjedrey]

It sort of blows my mind when I look at my 9-year-old son, and realize that he has never known a world without satellite television, cell phones, e-mail, high speed internet, DVD's, the World Wide Web, or IM.  When I explain to him how we didn't have Playstation 3 when I was a kid, but, rather, played "Pong" in black and white, he gapes at me and wonders aloud how we didn't all go nuts.   

[precisonline]

And I wonder what his face might look like if you added "ping" in front of "pong" and told him it didn't have a screen...?

[Tom Pellitieri]

I saw a cartoon recently with a teenager looking through his dad's vinyl record collection, wondering how big dad's backpack must have been to hold the music and walkman to play them...

And honestly, do any of these kids know why we "dial" a phone number??? 

[nmorgan]

I was talking with my oldest son (age 32) the other day he could not understand why I still marvel that Neal Armstrong walked on the moon 6 years before he was born.  To him it is just another fact from a history book and not one of the most breath-taking moments in the history of man.

[precisonline]

Somewhere, someone has probably done a study about this very issue, but there seems to be a real difference in attitude between events that have occurred in our lifetime vs. before.  I think there's a perception of relevance simply based on the fact of whether it happened during - or before - one's life.  It's egocentric, certainly, but I think it happens at such a subconscious level that most of the time we don't even realize that such a perception exists until we're challenged with it.

[GBoiceJr]

I agree with you, Kevin.

But sometimes, I look back and wonder if things were must simplier when we were growing up.   
I guess this is better known as "The Evolution of Technology".

[Dorian]

heh...

One of my favorite comments on technology happened in one of Ronald Reagan's public town-hall meetings.  This college student got up and asked, "How can you understand the world today?  My generation lives in a world filled with microwave ovens and VCR's and computers."

The president smiled down at him and in his best fatherly voice said, "I know. My generation INVENTED those things for you."

- Dorian

[precisonline]

HA!  Thanks for a great memory!