Recently while having a get together with some friends we were relating some experiences that seem quite pertinent to the subject of how communication is or will change. David the son of my friend Jackie was at a loss when told to call home. It seems our young guest had never had to use a rotary telephone. Confronted with this icon of past technology, David went away with a new experience to tell his friend about. Another guest, upon hearing of David’s story told of a similar experience she’d had. It seems that Loretta had given her son a watch for Christmas.
This wristwatch, complete with hands and a face was foreign to her son Tommy who has had the time electronically flashed at him in numeric form for all of his life without the need to know how to tell time conventionally. So it seems in this day and age, that the old continues to be replaced by the newer and faster technology. We in turn have a need to learn newer and faster ways of dealing with these new technologies. Technology grows and the more it grows the faster it grows. Yet with this technology we can learn how to decrease our work time while increasing our productivity.
We have definitely come a long way from the pony express and telegraph. With current technological advancements it is now possible to communicate across the planet instantaneously, thanks to things like fiber optics, e-mail, and satellites all of which make this possible. With the invention of the printing press and the first book in print came the birth of the information age. Accompanying the birth of the information age was an explosion of new technological advances designed to improve how we communicate.
With the birth of the twentieth century we’ve seen a drastic growth in the way we communicate with each other. With cellular telephones, personal computers, palm pilots, and online shopping. These advancements have all been designed to save us time, and help us communicate with one another. These are the tools of the “wired world”, which in turn encourages our interaction and participation. And in fact make our lives much easier. While the next generation will without a doubt, find themselves lost without these technological wonders, we at the other end find it a little unsettling.
What will happen if they have to ever live without the Internet? The Internet is capable of linking so many people together all over the world. No matter how hard your search you’ll find something about it on the Internet because it is so vast. So even though Technology is the way our future is going my question is that shouldn’t we also make sure that we don’t become to dependent on our keyboards? If we don’t we might become a society that’s ruled by the Technology instead of us ruling the Technology.