Technology

With our friends over yesterday for a lazy Easter Monday afternoon, I got to chatting about how I’ve been downloading music and the odd TV show / movie and my mate Noyz (who is my age) mentioned how all this technology has passed him by and was asking how I or anyone else got to know how to do “stuff” on computers and the like. It’s a hard question to answer.  Then I also look at my two girls and how they are both handy on a mouse (they can double click and click and drag) and both like to do things on a computer.  Similarly I noticed on Sunday that my 18mth old nephew had a PC in his play room and that it was on with MS Word open with a document titled “Will’s Typing” and of course with a series of random letters punched in.

So for me, who can remember when Dad brought home our first colour TV and I can also remember when we got a VCR for the first time (and we rented Beverly Hills Cop) who now runs this blog, plays online games through a firewall and chats on IRC with his gaming buddies looks at my daughters double-clicking away, I can see the future and how the geeks of tomorrow will be able to do amazing things in the technosphere.

Technology is growing at an amazing rate.  For example, for nearly 100 years, the old gramophone record held sway in terms of music.  Sure, sound systems developed around it, but the black vinyl record was the main steady medium for delivering recorded music.  Then the A-Track and then quickly the cassette tape followed and became the new technology for say 20 years.  Records still were the main, but digital recording via magnetic tape became the “new way”.  Tapes break though and there was this whisper in about 1990 about CD technology.  I was finishing high school and can remember the first CD player that a friend had.  They were rumoured to be indestructible and people would Frisbee them about and then stick them in their CD player… we all know now that the can scratch quite easily.

Then 10 years on, DVD became the norm and in only 5yrs further iPod’s started coming into existence.  Now CD sales are dropping like a stone and the ability to download MP3 formatted music from record stores is now considered “normal”.

My point is the change of technology is increasing at an exponential rate.  From vinyl record to MP3, the rate of change is accelerating, so when I see my kids “just knowing how” to turn on our DVD player and rebooting the PC (Kate knows ALT-CTRL-DEL) I feel an ever increasing need to keep up with this stuff.

I don’t want to be an old phogey who has been passed by with “new fangled technology” and I want to be able to keep in the know how to do the latest thing.  I jump in and read about torrent streaming and IRC and tried them out and now use them automatically.  I had to have a Blog for some reason and now post here regularly although I have never kept a paper diary.  I just am enthused to take on new things and play with them and learn… but similarly I don’t want to be by passed.

I have friends that I have never met face to face and consider Twahn, theopacman, snorri and the rest of the fella’s at #swl as good friends.  Whilst my life long school buddies such as Noyz probably look at me with a view of “what the fuck are you doing that for?”, I have the view perhaps of how can you afford not to…

Technology: its happening so quickly that I believe if you don’t at least try to keep up, you’ll be left behind in a very big way.