Most people that know me will agree that I’m old before my time. And they’re probably right. I embrace being grumpy, I like to make it be known what a sorry state of things are, but it occurred to me last night that I truly am getting old.
When setting an alarm for morning on my phone, it tells me how long it is until I’m required to hit snooze. If I see anything under eight hours I pre-emptively plan for a day spent yawning and drinking enough caffeine to wake the dead. All I need is to see 7 Hours 35 Minutes to be displayed and I’m feverishly trying to get to sleep as soon as possible, panicking that I may sleep through the entire following day. There is however one part of me that refuses to age, and that’s my reliance on technology.
I always presumed that one day technology would flummox me, even now I see people refuse to learn how to use a new device, Mandy being the prime example. I bought her a tablet for her birthday last year (possibly the biggest waste of money of 2012), and now Jasper uses it on a daily basis.
It got me thinking, my parents grew up with relatively small advances in consumer technology. From being kids to around the 90s, landlines didn’t really change, TVs got a bit of colour then grew a bit (plus a change in aspect ratio), mobiles made a rather bulky appearance, and PCs took tentative steps into the mass market. But since then, the number appended to the word PlayStation has made a steady incline, the quality in video has gone from silver halide film, to magnetic tape, to hard disk drives, to solid state memory all in a decade or two, they say by the time the first PC of a new line makes it onto the first desk it’s already out of date and my mobile bought last year has more processing power than the laptop I’m using which is only four years old.
Am I then, part of a new generation; where our parents were good at being frugal and home cooking, my lot are just able to use technology intuitively? I love getting a new bit of software, or phone or any advancement come to mention it; even a firmware update will see me put an hour or two onto tech forums to see what’s changed, the feeling of finding the newest shortcut or navigating the most recent layout still interests me. Then I remember my mate Dave, who has in the past few months finally joined us in the 21st century with an iPhone, now all that’s left to concur is his archaic Windows 95 machine…
Maybe it’s just me then, maybe one day when tech becomes biotech and we all get a chip buried into our grey matter and instead of learning how to do things we download it a-la-Neo, maybe then I’ll be reluctant to update, reluctant to change. Until then, Mr Android, what’s next?
