Recently I was having a chat with my son and he asked me if I had an arm holder for my iPhone when I was a kid? I tried to explain the Walkman and a cassette tape, but I am not sure he really “got it.” He understands the cloud…
We watched Home Alone 3 and the bad people have a Palm Pilot. I tried to explain the Palm Pilot and its
significance to my boys as they surfed the web, listened to music, watched You
Tube, and played games on their iPods. But
again, I don’t think they really understood the Palm Pilot. Why did it need a cable to synchronize? Why didn’t it use Wi-Fi? Why wasn’t it your phone?
If you’ve purchased a new phone and had to move your life
from your old gadget to the new one, you realize how destabilizing the process can
be. I apparently depend on 60 some apps
to know where I am (Google Maps, Foursquare), remember everything (Evernote,
Egretlist), manage travel (Concur, Expedia, [pick an airline]), bank, relax, socialize
(Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), and carry more than 10G
(digital books, photos, music, videos) of stored stuff around with me.
During my lifetime, music has moved from analog recordings
on 12-inch wax disks to digital recordings on solid-state drives that you measure
in millimeters. Cassette Tapes, Compact
Disks, MP3’s, Napster, and then iTunes in between. My digital footprint in the cloud and the
number of digital accounts I own, manage, and remember the passwords for is
staggering.
In High School, I could call most of my friend’s phone and
pager numbers by memory, used a rotary standing next to a phone jack or
occasionally quarters when dialing, and paid the phone company extra to get the
number of the person calling. Now I
pretty much only remember my wife’s number, have to check my own email
signature for my number at work, regularly risk injury walking around staring
at a little screen, and am blessed that my phone translates the incoming number
to someone’s name and picture.
During college, I had a paid print newspaper subscription
and enjoyed riding the train and reading the printed word. Today my “paper” is delivered wirelessly overnight
and it’s another one of those apps I depend on.
