So my niece came down from college this weekend to visit her family and since its been awhile since we all had been together we decided to do a mass outing for dinner.
Plans were made, times were set, restaurant was picked and all that jazz.
As we were all standing around the living room getting ready to leave my niece suddenly exclaims :"Oh crap I forgot I promised my boyfriend I would call him before we left, do we have time"? So we assured her she had time and she pulls out her cellphone only to exclaim "Oh NOOOOOOOO!!!! My battery is DEEEEAAAAADDDDD!!!!!!" which as I'm sure most of you with teenagers or being a teenager yourself can attest is as close to a near death experience as you can get to these days.
No problem I assured her, you can simply use our phone and I point to the landline (yes I still have one) handset on the table next to her.
She picks up the handset and suddenly gets a puzzled look on her face. What's the matter we enquire as she stands there staring at the handset as if it's from outer space.
I don't know his phone number, she replied.
Now a little backstory here. She's been going out with this guy for a little over 10 months at this time. She talks to him daily, multiple times a day actually. And yet she has NO clue what his phone number is, not even the area code (there are multiple ones in my area).
Am I that old or is she that young?
It took a few minutes for me to be able speak again after finally catching my breath after laughing over what I consider the absurdity of the situation. After all in my generation, we had to actually memorize and know the phone number of the person you wanted to call. If you didn't have a good memory you used to have this thing called an address book. It was similar to a phone book but was smaller, portable and instead of having everyone's phone number in it, you only wrote the people whose number you wanted to call. Pretty nifty huh?
Well my niece didn't seem to find this funny at all and its not like any of use could simply offer her our cell phones since we didn't have her boyfriend on speed dial.
So her mother suggested she simply leave her phone plugged in and let it charge while we were out to dinner and when we got home she would be able to call him then.
This idea didn't sit too well with her since she had PROMISED (maybe pinkie promised I didn't push to find out) that she would call her boyfriend BEFORE we went to dinner.
Non-plussed she suddenly looked up and asked if she could use my laptop for a few minutes. I carefully said yes and asked her why.
Simple, she replied, I'll just Facebook message him and have him send me his number that way she said with a smile. Problem solved.
Sure enough within 2 minutes he replied back, she had his number, and was happily talking away
Crisis averted.
Am I that old or is she that young?
It's not like I don't understand what happened, the technology involved or anything like that.
It's that I simply don't think that way. Back in my day, you knew people's phone numbers. You actually had to call them and find out if they were home or not. You couldn't simply log into a page and find out where they were, what location they were checked into, what they had for dinner, breakfast or when their last bowel movement was. If they didn't answer the phone or weren't home you were simply out of luck. No 2 minute replies on how to get ahold of them.
We had a good laugh about all of this over dinner and about how much technology has changed the lives of the current generation in ways they don't even understand. It's been that way for their entire lives, and they take it for granted. I might as well be telling stories from 200 years ago not 20 or 30 years ago about how things were before we had instant access to knowledge via the internet, instant access to friends no matter where they were and the such.
So I ask one final time:
Am I that old or is she that young?
One thing I know for certain, this Christmas she's getting both a VCR and a Walkman. Let's she how smart she is then LOL
Neither, technology is moving at an exponential rate, creating a completely new cultural gap between generations. When you really think about how fast we've progressed (technologically speaking), it almost becomes unfathomable. (at least for me.)
I remember as a kid, my dad showing me old record players, and tube televisions, and I took quite the interest to all the outdated tech. I think it's pretty cool that you have plans to give her a Walkman and VCR. Who knows, maybe she will be fascinated.
I can totally relate. I have an 8 year old son, and from time to time I like to ask him what he would do if he didn't have a tablet, he generally says he'll figure out a way to get it back, and then I ask, "Well what if tablets didn't exist?" I guess I'm molding him into a little philosopher already lol.
Nice read! @ancientknowled3
Thanks @futremind
Just struck mer about the dichotomy of our handles, you the forward looking side, me the ancient looking side of the same coin :)
Yeah this really was one of those times where it truly was funny as the events unfolded, simply based on how each party perceived reality. As you said the speed at which technology has advanced has become so incredible that within a single their can be single iterations of inventions meaning that these "things" no longer cross generations, sometimes don't even make it past a single generation.
As you stated, unfathomable, truly
Now that you mention it, that is a bit ironic!
Have you heard of Moore's Law? It's an interesting theory that's staggeringly accurate thus far. The root concept being exponentialism, specifically in regards to technological growth. Here's a link to wikipedia explaining it, if its something you'd be interested in reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
Moore's law
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years. The period is often quoted as 18 months because of a prediction by Intel executive David House (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and the transistors being faster).Moore's prediction proved accurate for several decades, and has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.
Well now, you might just be the most useful bot I've seen on Steemit yet!
He might wabbit, he might
But the bot (butbot?) took all my thunder in citing the fact that the original paper stated 1 year and not 2.
That's not usually a fact many know
As we continue to advance the period needed for Moore's law to effect is slowing increasing as we reach the edges of our technological know-how
There will need to be a major leap again before we can move back to an exponential curve versus the logarithmic one we are moving towards now.
Of course, once we have that new technology would Moore's law even be applicable?
More ponderings for the @futremind's among us
LOL
And that sir, is the million dollar question. When you have full autonomous, self aware, self coding artificial intelligence that can think 20,000 years in relative form for every week of human level thinking, you have then reached the level of what we can no longer comprehend. At least, I highly doubt we can comprehend what this would entail, and the scary part, is we are well on the way of achieving this.
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I find myself amazed by some of the things that have changed over the years. Again though phones and TV's were crazy compared to what my grandparents grew up with. I just hope that I am able to continue to stay on the front edge of whatever comes out.
Back when I was younger and held a position of importance, "cutting" edge wasn't good enough, I was one of those always on the "bleeding" edge of technology.
Now I'm more content to surf the wave of technology than to be in front of it.
That's a better way to put it. I just want to be involved. I don't need to be at the front. Just as long as I am part of the group.