I was gifted a beeper at the young age of fourteen after I begged and pleaded with my parents for months. I probably had no more than four text messages from my best friend at the time before I lost the beeper. At the age of sixteen I had my first cell phone (the Startek), once again not enough calls and too quickly lost and/or broken. Cut almost a decade later and I find myself attached at the hip to my 3G iPhone, Blackberry Curve and DELL laptop. As each generation is a modification of the previous, I am frightened to see how far technology has come and how necessary it is in our daily lives to function. This piece of device gets more mileage out of me than anything else ever has, from taking pictures, getting directions, playing games, browsing the web, etc etc etc. I need it, bottom line. The blackberry curve functions as my work phone, and basically keeps me on a leash in case my boss decides he needs me then and now. The same goes for the laptop, but I have to admit I use each device more than I would like to. Microsoft Outlook haunts me from day to night with "reminders", blinking and beeping.
Being older Russian immigrants from the Ukraine, my grandparents wouldn't know a bit from a bite and an atom from a hard drive. To give you an example, my grandmother got call-waiting installed only about a year ago. Prior to this, it was impossible to get a hold of her. If given the opportunity to play with the current technology, Grandma would certainly disapprove and say something like " why waste your time starring at a screen that hurts your eyes". I will have to say, she may just be onto something.
I can only speak from myself (but I am sure I speak for others) when I say that there has been times when technology has left me disappointed by the lack of compatibility with actual human thought and behavior. In "Being Analog" by Don Norman, he describes the phenomenon as " living in a technology centered world, where the technology is not appropriate for the people". Things that people are normally quite poor at doing, like accuracy, dates, times, concrete facts, are exactly the kind of things that are needed by computers and other sources of media to function properly. It's the moments when you spent over an hour on ask.com trying to figure out the problem with your excel formula, when you could have simply picked up a calculator and done it yourself.
You can't blame grandma for being analog, she's from a different generation and culture, one thats quite different from the current but not necessarily in a bad way. You also can't blame Steve Jobs for invading your office and home, while people are expected to be digital and handle the complexity of everyday life, the iPhone is making those complexities that much easier to handle.
Whether I prevail in my efforts to hold onto a sense of being analog like my grandparents and parents have managed to do or give in to the digital world, I hope that as each generation finds itself needing to learn more and more, they as well as I, find the time to just be in the moment.
