For the 1980s, having a cell phone, any cell phone, was probably considered high tech and I even remember thinking I was a badass for having a pager and a calling card when my friends were carrying change and using the pay phone.
The reason I began this whole line of thinking to begin with is because I’m having more issues than Sports Illustrated. And it’s not with my meds since my doctor made me break the pills in half and suggested I quit doing Abba karaoke.
My issues are of the technology sort and when I say technology issues, I don’t mean that my devices are malfunctioning or my toys are old or I’m having trouble figuring out how to use them. My gripe is that my cutting edge technology seems much less cutting edge six months later. The half-life of technology used to be half my life but now it seems like six weeks. My new iPad was purchased a month after it was released and as soon as I bought it, I heard the clock start ticking down like a bomb in the action movie of your choice. Let me explain.
Last May, I got an iPad 3. Well it wasn’t exactly called an iPad 3; Apple called it The New iPad. Since then, two more full sized iPads and a smaller iPad have been released which I guess would make them The New New iPad, The New New New iPad, and the iPad Mini. So, just be clear, my iPad would be considered the Old Old New iPad and the only way to distinguish it from The New New iPad and The New New New iPad is the fact that my iPad is the only one with a 30 pin connector charging cable. The New iPads look quite similar to my Old Old New iPad but in a years time, these once cutting edge devices look like Rosie O'Donnell on a Victoria Secret runway, even though there’s no new device to replace them.
So if my new devices look somewhat dated, what will our kids think of our high tech devices thirty years from now. During our parents generation, fax machines came online that could send a one page document over a phone line in about eighteen minutes and their parents called it the devil box because they had to snail mail everything which was way ahead of what their parents had to deal with considering pony express was a huge leap forward.
Will my iPad be the next Betamax, the 300lb portable typewriter, or the Google Chromebook? Is the iPhone 5 I waited three hours for on launch day going to seem like Dodge Dart (the old one and not the new one)? Is Donald Duck's not wearing of pants a political statement or is it just laundry day?
No matter how advanced and cutting edge our technology might seem to us, our children’s generation will think it needs resharpening: “You only had 160 channels. Geez, we have 3000 channels of nothing to watch." And my 64GB iPhone 5, 64GB iPad Mini, 64GB iPad 3, 640GB Toshiba external hard drive, and 1TB Seagate Wireless Plus portable hard drive that can stream video to three devices simultaneously, will seem like an 1.21 gigawatt 8 track player Animal Glued to a bedazzled rotary dial pay phone, if you remember what any of those are.
The man who said “everything that has ever been invented already has been” was one of the more ignorant men in history but we’re assuming he meant to be right; perhaps his goal was to be remembered which would make him an evil genius.
Henry Ford was a visionary, even before bifocals, and an innovator to the people of his day but today, his inventions would be bested by the car from Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and that is after it burned. The hip and cool clothes our parents wore in the 1960s are quite silly today and I remember being a righteously groovy dude with my mullet, parachute pants, and gold name plate necklace while driving my mid-engine Pontiac Fiero.
Today’s latest gadgets technology and inventions are tomorrow’s $5 garage sale. What I paid $700 for last May is worth $500 today and will be a paperweight in two years.
Captain Kirk had a flip phone which seemed great back in the seventies but most of Gene Rodenberry’s fantasies are old hat now. The swooshy doors are in every grocery store and shopping mall and I’m now Kirking it with the big leather chair pulled up right in front of my wall sized television. Spock had his communicator and I have bluetooth. They had phasers set to stun and we have tasters; they had Telepresence and we have FaceTime. It seems the only thing we don’t have is that teleportation thing which is kind of good because if we did have it, I’d be expected to be at work on time.
Not that I'm getting on my soapbox or anything and I wouldn't do that as they're unstable and I'm afraid of heights but sometimes I like to be late to work and 'traffic' is the adult version of 'the dog ate my homework.' And on snow days, I'd have to make it in because everyone knows transporters aren't affected by bad weather. 'What's the matter? Is your transporter set to fat and lazy?' With all of the brilliant people out there, you know some idiot is working on the transporter. I'd like to find this guy and break his thumbs, or at least send him an Xbox. There's nothing like Call of Duty and Bioshock to suck the motivation out of someone.
My five inch floppy has been replaced by a wireless hard drive, which makes my girlfriend oh so happy at bedtime, and my Sony Walkman has lost it's job to an iPhone which is also an iPod, a phone, a portable tv, an Internet communication device, and a hard drive. If someone would have told me twelve years ago that a device 1/8 the size of a cassette would be invented that could hold every song I'd ever heard and any song I'd ever want to hear, I would have guessed something like that would have cost $1 million. But they give those out in children's birthday party gift bags now.
I know you'd like to help but I've got a technology sickness that no Genius Bar doctor can cure.
