In the ‘90s, college professors used transparency sheets with potentially high-inducing fumes to project lecture notes. Some still do today — even if PowerPoint notes are standard.

It’s typical for technology to evolve so fast that to stay employed, you have to learn new technology skills virtually every couple years. With social media, multimedia and new media, is the pace faster than ever? That’s debatable. But plenty of us might be getting dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

The effect might be this: an enormous employment advantage to the proactive mind that embraces change and new technology. This is good for students like the ones who learn the latest Apple product; seek to understand networks like Twitter — even if its just for the “knowledgeable in social media” resume bulletpoint; and take up Web site building for the sake of knowing it.

For the students who don’t like Facebook’s fairly extreme impact on social interaction, miss the once-dominance of print media and disagree that Twitter hashtags might become more influential than the “CC” function of e-mail — you might not be pleased with next year’s job market.

Consider the possibility of an interview question like “Do you have ideas for how to maintain/boost our brand via social media?” becoming standard for a thousand job descriptions that, until recently, had very little to do with marketing.

What we might find is a once-average segment of society, only mildly resistant to technology, is rapidly losing its relevancy in years to come. Just a mild sense of technophobia might be compared to the Harry Potter version of “muggles” — what the book series labeled the hapless, non-magic population.

For example: It’s 2009 and you want to send an office-wide memo. You write one up and e-mail it to your department.

In 2019, you want to write the same “memo” to send to your department.

You build a once-complicated multimedia presentation that now takes you 20 minutes. Instead of inserting clip-art, you design an animated graphic that makes noises and responds to user feedback. You take a short video of yourself speaking and integrate the video into your presentation. Some of your employees are out of the office, so you compress the presentation and make it workable for a dozen different smart phone brands. You use social media networks to allow real-time communication between employees in short-character bursts if they have any questions on the subject. Just to be thorough, you design a Wiki page to allow up-to-date interpretations of the subject.

Not into programming? This scenario might play out regardless of your field, whether you’re a high school English teacher or an HR person for a small business.

News media and mass communication fields like advertising and public relations are perhaps the flagship for this trend — anyone who makes a living in a communication field has to master these types of subjects or risk becoming obsolete.

But by no means is social media a fad. Terms like cloud computing, nanotechnology and augmented reality might be somewhat limited to a few sectors now — they could become an everyday concept by the time your kid is 5 years old, and he or she could understand them at a level that most people do now.

Not a fan of technology, social media and/or the infinite mainstream tech trends the media tells you to care about? Prefer the good old days of faxes and traditional radio? It doesn’t really matter what the merits are of those viewpoints — and there are plenty of legitimate ones. These areas are rising in prominence and virtually exploding all around us. The students eagerly embracing these new trends, even the fad-like ones, are likely going to be the major players. The rest of us could be the analog players in a digital world.

Reach Matt at matt.culbertson@asu.edu