Some of you will remember the desperate hopefulness of sitting through the dial-up internet’s obnoxious BE-bawbawbawbawbaw, hoping, waiting for AOL to finally open and hope you could get everything you wanted done before it disconnected again and you had to restart the process.
I am simply astounded that from a teeny rectangle that I can hold with one hand, I can order ANYTHING in the world I want, keep in touch with my family who live very far away, shoot, edit, publish, and track the life of my videos, read books, magazines, and watch the news, reconnect and bear witness to the lives of friends I’ve not seen since 25+ years, find recipes for dinner, and answers to virtually any question I ever had. It is absolutely incredible the leaps and bounds tech has made in even just the last decade!!
Technology catches a lot of flack these days for isolating us from one another. Photo campaigns show people looking at their screens rather than each other, children and parents sitting together watching their respective tablets, instead of having interface. My belief is that there have always existed devices to separate and distract us from one another. Before everyone sat on public transport staring at their devices, they would have their faces buried in a book or newspaper. So it behooves us indeed, just as it always has, to ensure we’re balancing screentime with giving our attention to other things in our lives, but who among us would like to go back to a life where this richness, this facility of access to information doesn’t exist? I, for one, LOVE the access we currently enjoy.