In the words of Timbuk 3 “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades“…
I updated the software that runs this blog last night and can’t help but marvel at how connected we are. Yes, I’m a technology geek… always have been. We’ve gotten to a point where we take for granted things that were almost impossible when we were kids… by the way, I’m in my forties… old by some standards, young by others… I’ll let you decide. My point is, the most fantastic technology gadgets we had in the house when I was a kid were Color TV, radio, records (the kind that go on record players) tape recorders and the telephones. Many had cameras, some had movie cameras; Back then people were usually cautious with their picture taking… It cost a lot to buy film, and it cost a lot to develop it. Now you can take pictures and store them on a computer. My experience is that it’s cheaper once you take the plunge… I took more pictures on the trip to Alaska last summer than families took during the 1960s… and more people can see them too! We are now on our fifth iteration of video recording technology… video tape (Betamax and VHS), laser disk, DVD, DVRs, Blue Ray… ok so some of them are newer runs of older technology… the point is in the past 30 years there have been 5 different ways to record or play movies on your TV.
The first computer game console that I can remember was the Atari 2600. I played Pong and Breakout on it at a friends house. Today, people have multiple computers and video game consoles. Many (not all) houses are on the information superhighway envisioned on a paper napkin in the early 60s. Today most families have multiple television sets. I remember seeing movies and TV shows when I was a kid where television of the future (from the 70s perspective) would be right on the wall… and look, you can put a plasma or LCD television on the wall now.
Think about cell phones… in 1979 they were quite large and unwieldy… they had to be mounted in cars. The FCC authorized them in the early 80s and I saw a lot of them in the days when I drove a bread route in New York City. Now they’re small enough to put in your pocket and many families have multiple cell phones, even the kids have their own lines.
We use all of this technology in ways that were inconceivable when I was a kid. We as common citizens have the ability to publish to the world… ANYBODY can read what we post; Anybody can watch the pictures and videos we shoot… We have access to more information than intelligence organizations had access to during the 1950s. You can load up a copy of Google Earth and look at satellite or aerial photography of nearly any point on the surface of the earth and it’s generally better imagery than the President had access to during the Cuban Missile crisis in October of 1962. It’s no wonder SOME contries censor what their people can access on the Internet; information is power.
Again, I think we take technology for granted now; This becomes apparent during power outages or when a computer system is down at the license bureau you can’t update your drivers license… I sometimes wonder what it would be like today; if we didn’t have our cell phones, or laptop computers with their ability to connect to the Internet wirelessly; or GPS receivers, digital cameras, digital camcorders, digital video recorders. Like I said, I’m a technology geek… We’ve had a lot of innovation in the last thirty years; consider what we have in store over the next 30 years. It’s a great time to be a techno-geek!