Just another Day in Paradise

It is Friday night, and the kiddos are home. It has been a long week and we are all recovering. My husband and I are watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith, our 17 year old son is in his room playing his PS3, our 11 year old daughter is in her room on her computer, and our youngest, seven years old, is flipping though the newspaper in curiosity.  My husband says, “you should be looking at the comics.” My son looks up at him in confusion, and we realize he has no idea what we are talking about.

This is not surprising, as we have not had a newspaper in our house for about five years. We get all of our news from the internet, no need for a newspaper. Comics are one of many things our kids will never experience. Saturday morning cartoons, the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday evenings, or the challenge of trying to tape a song off the radio for your “mix tape”. You wouldn’t think that the gap between then and now would be so very large, but we as a technological society are moving at the speed of light, instead of sound. Another example of how much life has changed was exhibited in a movie we watched the other night, War Games. “Would you like to play a game?” Remember that movie? My husband and I were watching it and it took us both back. Our seventeen year old son decided to watch it with us and the entire film was foreign to him. From the original analog dial up to the five and a half floppy discs, the dot matrix printer, and the tape machines instead of servers. Global Thermonuclear War also needed to be explained. Our son was laughing at the bulky relics that were once cutting edge technology and amazed at the extremity of the cold war. What’s a beeper? That tape thing used to play music? What is this stationary, why can’t I just send an email? You didn’t have Facebook when you were in high school? Now we have everything from telephones the size of a credit card you can take anywhere to computer images appearing on clear glass and touch based technology.

Not just technology has changed. Society as a whole has changed. Simple things like learning cursive, writing a check, checking a book out from the library, or ordering a pizza has all evolved to fast, easy, and idiot proof (almost). People used to groan if you used a credit card, and now we groan if you use cash. We had a huge change jar in our living room for all of the spare change we would collect. Now the bank does it for you automatically.  The radical and speedy evolution from our childhood to our children’s present day has seen possibly the most important technological changes in the shortest amounts of time. We have taken leaps and bounds, leaving behind the rudimentary ways of our childhood, and embracing all that modern technology has to offer.

Warnings though, don’t try to leave it all behind. Remember the way it was once and count your blessings. We all learn eventually that faster is not always better, and sometimes pen to paper means more than a blip on a screen saying “You’ve Got Mail”. This is true especially when the credit card machine goes offline and the eighteen year old kid behind the counter pulls out the metal machine that takes an impression of your card. He will look at it in ignorance and call for help. Just take a breath, laugh, and offer him a lesson.