There was a show we watched a year or so ago that underscored the fast pace with which technology has taken over our world. The producers took a family in England and rigged their house with only the contraptions that would have been available for a specific time period. I think they started in the 1940's and worked their way up to modern day. Each "era" lasted one week. The family included a teenage daughter and a couple of younger sons. They found creative ways to entertain themselves in the early years. The kids grew bored by the time they got to the 1970's and they were able to play Space Invaders and Pac Man. By the time they completed their journey, they were ready to hook up to the google and jump back into the 21st Century.
This started me thinking about my own experiences. I've aged during a time in history when technology has advanced at breakneck speed. I learned to type on a manual typewriter. Then mastered the electric typewriter and 10-key calculator. I worked in a print shop in high school on a then-state-of-the-art CompuGraphic typesetting machine. You had to change the font by replacing a strip of film. You saw your copy in a window that was about 6 inches wide. Once you hit the return button, the words printed on the light-sensitive paper, which had to be developed in a chemical bath. Then you could take the type and cut and paste it onto your board, which was shot by a huge camera. You developed the film and used it to make a plate, which you put on a press to print. Piece of cake.
In 1983, my place of employment purchased a Wang Word Processing System, which was quite the thing. The Wang was a mainframe system. A clunky box with a green screen lived on my desk. I was in accounting at the time and was required (after half a day's training) to create elaborate spreadsheets. Mastering the beast was no easy feat. I had to code in each column manually. If I miscalculated, I had to go back into the system and rejigger the formula until the columns lined up the way I wanted them to. It was cool back in the day. Really.
Fast forward to 1990 and my first Mac.It was small, but all I was doing was typing words, so it sufficed. Today at work I have a Mac with a 25-inch screen, a trim keyboard, a small orange box and a CD player. Pretty amazing.
On the home front, we have an old laptop that gets the job done.I don't have all of the latest electronic doodads, but I keep up fairly well. My husband uses my cell phone more than I do (he has a dumb phone). He takes panoramic photos and makes movies and checks the score of whatever game is playing. I admit that texting is a cool thing. And we get a fair amount of entertainment value from seeing how our phone translates our voice-activated messages.
There are times I wonder, now that I've experienced these modern contraptions, would I be able to go back and live in the past?
I would miss the ease of looking up information on the internet, of finding out what happened to old friends and doing genealogical research with a world full of information at my fingertips. I would miss the ease of keeping in touch via Facebook and email. And it's nice to be able to communicate with my son via texting.
I would not miss the frantic pace that modern technology has helped to create. Because everything is instant, people think results should be instant. There's no time to ponder anything. We joke at work because every job that comes through our department is labeled "HOT!" This is just one of the symptoms of a larger problem. It's not that more is being accomplished -- the work actually takes longer to accomplish because changes can be made right up to the last minute.
Of course, it would be a whole lot harder for my son to exist in a world without computers and such because he's never known any other way. I'm glad to have come of age when I did. It's nice to have been able to see how our tools have changed over the years.
I almost said "how we've evolved" but I'm not sure that's true.
I see couples sitting across the table from each other texting and ignoring one another. I'm not convinced that's progress.
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