Looking back at old family photo albums, I spotted a photo of me as a baby with a rotary phone in the background. I laughed at the thought that my nieces and nephews probably don’t know what that is — or how to use one.
In my five decades of life so far, I’ve been witness to many technological innovations that have shaped all aspects of life.
Here are some of the big ones:
(1) How We Connect
Let’s start with that phone. In 1975, a rotary phone was commonplace. Eventually they gave way to push-pad phones. Then came the “revolution” of the cordless phone — which you could take off the wall and into another room in the house.
The car phone might feel trite in today’s world, but it was a revolution: the phone outside the home. Cell phones let us take our conversations to the streets — for better and worse.
After typing messages using a numeric keypad, my Samsung phone with a full keyboard felt like a marvel — until the Blackberry came along.
Eventually the iPhone brought us a computer in our pocket, more ubiquitous texting and colorful emojis.
(2) How We Listen to Music
As a child, I had a little record player on which I played vinyl records. One of my first albums that I got was the Cabbage Patch album — on vinyl. I remember my parents’ 8-track tapes.
But I came of age in the era of the cassette tape, the Walkman and the boom box — which allowed you to copy songs from one cassette to another.
For anyone inclined to dismiss the patience and persistence of Gen X, look no further than the effort involved to make a mixed tape.
It was a labor of love that required sitting for hours at your boom box listening to the radio, with your finger on the record button, just waiting for the first few bars of the song you wanted to come on the air.
I took hours longer than it takes to make playlists on Spotify.
Eventually, we got CDs.
I lived through the rise and fall of Napster before music was liberated to digital, allowing me to finally get just that one song I really wanted off an album.
(3) How We Record Life
Today it’s easy to record any moment with your phone, a task so simple that my young nieces and nephews have been doing it since they could hold a phone in their hands.
The pictures in my earliest photo albums were taken with large 35mm film cameras. My first camera was a polaroid. In college, I often used disposable point-and-shoot cameras. Digital cameras didn’t come into the mainstream until after I had graduated law school in 2000.
Most of my early life is not documented in moving pictures. Recording on Super 8, and eventually on VHS, was a clunky job that required a special occasion to merit the effort.
Even the mini-DVD recorders were only for milestone moments, not daily life.
Today, we can record anything at any time.
Other Evolutions
I’ve lived through dial-up connections, the dot matrix printer, and sending letters through “snail mail.”
When I was in school, a research project required a trip to the library — something foreign to my nieces and nephews, who wonder why I didn’t just use Google.
Printing a report took hours — and heaven help you if the little holes on the side of the paper didn’t align properly in the printer and the paper got rumpled. You had to realign the paper and restart from the beginning. Then you had to peel off those edges.
Until we got a VCR, to watch a television show required being in front of the TV at the time of the show. There was no VCR, no DVR, no on-demand.
The World is Constantly Changing
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it’s enough to prove the point:
If the past 50 years has taught me anything, it’s that the world is constantly changing. The way we interact and engage with our environment and each other is always evolving.
And that requires us to evolve as well.
Each innovation and iteration of life requires new skills and adaptations.
We must change along with the world.
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