The current boom in technology has had a profound effect on our generation. It has shaped the psyche of today’s youth in ways no one could have ever predicted.
Growing up in public schools, it was common for my teachers to halt a lesson plan due to technical difficulties with an iMac, projector or speaker system. Students immediately became the teachers, shouting out from their seats which button to press, which cord to plug in or what to click on before one young person would invariably rise and walk to the front of the room and assist the teacher in, well, teaching. Even now, in my classes at ASU, it’s not uncommon for a teacher to stall a lesson and call in one of the I.T. assistants to get the PowerPoint presentation to appear on the wall.
When our parents get a new cell phone, they act as if they’ve traded in their car for an airplane. To people born before the Internet explosion, acquiring a new device means learning an entirely new system. Yet, when I look around at people my own age, they master their new cell phone in an hour or two. They can pick up any television remote, any MP3 player or laptop and get it to do what they need it to do. It’s amazing to watch younger kids play video games — they’ll say something like, “I’ve never played this game before,” or, “Oh, you have a PlayStation 3? I have an Xbox,” and proceed to pick up an unfamiliar controller and begin playing an unfamiliar game without a single question of, “Which button does what?”
The constant technological change has pervaded our culture since we were born — we’ve gotten very good at quickly adapting to new technology. We’ve become maestros inside of Photoshop, while our parents can still struggle with their email on the computer they’ve had for five years.
A student in my fiction writing class recently submitted a story about a character that lived through 9/11, and had started that day like any other: by checking his Facebook. Another student had to remind the author that Facebook didn’t exist in 2001. We’ve changed so much in a single decade that we’ve forgotten what life was like just 10 years ago.
If you really think about it, our growth has been frighteningly exponential. A hundred years ago, Arizona was barely a state, and there were no cars. Today, we go to a state university and use FaceTime to ask our friends about homework on iPhones while riding the light rail.
Google recently announced ‘Project Glass’ — eyeglasses which provide information right before our eyes. The glasses would allow us to video chat and take pictures, to see text messages and maps and much more. They’ve reported the idea has moved beyond the concept stage: Google has actually made functional prototypes of these glasses. The technology might sound like a far cry from anything we have today, but imagine showing an iPhone to someone in 1985, just less than 30 years ago.
If we went from no airplanes in 1900 to fighter jets in 2000, how can we imagine what we’ll do by 2050? Where are we going, and will we be able to keep up when we get there?
Share your predictions with the columnist at jwadler@asu.edu
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