After having spoken with my grandparents the other day, I've been caught up thinking about the technological discrepancy between our generations. Things like knowing my grandparents drove across the country in a pickup truck and only $15 make this disparity even more obvious. My grandmother toured the Midwest on a summer vacation teaching. She lived in the one room school houses and used old-fashioned pumps for water. It’s interesting to me to think that stories like this are now the beloved relics of a different time. Days of hiking and fishing or adventuring in the wood just don’t really happen anymore. Sentimental letters don’t get written and books lay gathering dust on the shelves. Of course there are still people who detach from the web of the internet and pull of the digital world, but the vast majority of us don’t. This obvious difference makes me wonder what we will tell our kids. Quips like, "Oh, yea, when I was your age, we had nine planets and the internet hadn’t been invented yet" just don't seem as important or worthy. I kind of like my grandparents' stories better; they were more substantial. These stories have more meaning in them overall because my grandparents had to survive relying on little more than themselves. They didn’t have a cell phone to call for help or a GPS system if they got lost. I think this speaks to how far we have come technologically speaking, but are all these new things and advances really for the best?
It almost scares me to think about how much we, as a society, have advanced from just a few decades ago. Everything is already so different from how it previously was. I remember I was less than seven when we got our first family computer. The information superhighway, however, was not for my general disposal as I had no idea how it worked. If I needed to write a report I used the complete Encyclopedia Britannica we had hiding out among our books. Today if you placed a computer in front of a seven year old I’m willing to bet they could fix whatever was wrong with it before continuing on to play their game. The difference is just astounding. Not to mention that I didn’t use an operating system above Windows 95 until I graduated high school. I also remember the massive cell phones and car phones that came before our teeny tiny little ENVs and iPhones. Along the same lines as my lack of computer upgrades, I didn’t have a cell phone until I graduated high school, and I was pretty ok with that. Things like the DS? The Wii? I grew up on the NES. And, much as we begged, we didn’t get a new system until my brother finally saved his money and bought a PS2. Now, I’m pretty certain younger generations would balk at the idea that laptops weren’t always readily available, Wikipedia wasn’t around to help with reports, and cell phones weren’t commonly owned by preteens.
Maybe I just can’t identify with this younger generation because everything that came out, and is for them usual and unimpressive, was for me exciting and new. It’s kind of like how I never gave a second thought to television. There was always a television in the house that we were allowed to watch. However, the DVD player was pretty ridiculously awesome when it came out. It beat the living hell out of the massive VHS players we had, though the pirated VHS tapes we had were kind of awesome. But, conversely, what will those who have always had the internet get? And granted things like the iPod only came out about eight years ago, thus revolutionizing the way we listen to music blah, blah, blah, will we evolve into the sci-fi movie we’re already trying desperately to imitate? Will we all be able to communicate telepathically through brain implants? Be beamed up or transport from place to place at will? I mean how cool would that be?
On a less personal and more global note of technological change, the masses can be informed of political happenings in a blink of an eye instead of however long it takes to make and print a paper; distribution is almost instantaneous using the internet. Opinions and articles like this allow hundreds of people to read ramblings and decide if they agree, disagree, don’t care, or stop reading before the article finishes. It’s kind of incredible. The point is that whether you agree with the article or even care about what was written, it’s out there to be seen by whoever has the inclination to read it. This would have been entirely impossible previously because printing couldn’t happen without money and subscribers and even after it had been printed, distribution was limited. Viewpoints have begun to sprout up in all corners of the internet about politics, cartoons, and life. People who would have gone their entire lives unknown are making a living on their youtube videos or blogs. The creativity and opinion of the masses in now on display for the entire world, should they look for it.
But, of course, it can’t all be good progress.
The printed word is already dying in almost all Medias. People aren’t getting the exercise recommended by their doctors because they’d rather sit at home with their toys. The brain isn’t as well exercised and its ability to store and access information is diminishing. Many people can’t spell or tell the difference between simple words like ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ because of spell check and autocorrect. While we now have mountains of information at our fingertips, how much of it is being used?
Along these lines, I almost feel like parental anxiety is going up as a direct result of this new found technology and its impact on children. There are scenes in stores where a parent gasps and frantically searches for their child who has only walked ahead of them a few feet, or turned down an aisle. There are V-chips in televisions, site blockers on personal computers, 911 only phones for small children, I’m sure the list goes on. But, why is that? Are we as a people becoming more derelict the better that technology gets or are we now able to focus only on the bad? Does the frequently negative news foster more anxieties about people, or are we only seeing the negative actions and people?
Outside of personal technology, things like blacksmithing, publishing, glassblowing, manufacturing, and other formerly specialized jobs are now preformed at least tenfold faster by various machines that just need to be built and programmed. While I won’t argue about the quality, the quantity that can be produced is astounding. Specialized jobs have been lost and the child labor has risen.
The question remains: are these advances worth the price we pay? Will it be deemed best to stop physically printing books in an effort to save what is left of the forests and plant life on Earth? The longer life spans mean over population is even more of a reality and that unless laws are again instituted to prohibit the amount of offspring a couple can have we’re pretty much doomed. The ever increasing reliance on technology means that, more than likely, the brain will continue to function at less and less capacity. To put it into perspective: think about ancient astronomers and what they went thought mathematically. They had to figure out what would happen if only part of the gnomon was used on a sundial and how to figure out the angular diameter of the moon without the sophisticated equipment we have now, and generally they were right. Conversely, now we need to use a calculator to work out simple calculus problems.
Overall, it is apparent that there are many good things and many not-so-good things that have come out of our technological progress. I do believe that if tempered with some reason, intelligence, and caution many more good things will come. We may not have discovered the secret of the flying car yet, but the advances we've made have flown as far as one. The only question left is this: is it truly for the better?