Perspective

I remember the cover of Time magazine in 1993 that said, "the information super highway will change your life," like it was yesterday. Hell, it practically was yesterday.

Soon, I was listening to that ethereal BEEP...GROWL...GROWL...WHIIIIINE...GROWLGROWL....BEEEEEEEEEEEEP..."WELCOME! YOU'VE GOT MAIL!" and the next thing you know, I'm all up in some chatrooms doing whatever the hell it was you were supposed to do in there. You paid by the minute in those days and there were only about five webpages in the entire world, so chatting was about all you could do. Unless you had the holy grail of computer gadgets: the scanner. If you were lucky enough to have one of these massively expensive and clunky boxes, you could take your crappy film photographs and convert them into even crappier grainy, digital photographs that you could then email to your chatmates. That is, if you wanted to wait three hours for each tiny snapshot to upload. And it all worked through the phone line, which was a real problem in the event of in incoming call or some sort of emergency, as the phone line for phone purposes was completely disabled.

I only bring all of this up because I think it is very easy to forget how far we've come and how fast we've gotten to where we are in terms of our technological advancements. In light of what was considered to be the "future" in 1993, we've surpassed every prediction of what life would be like "in the future" and we've done it in ways that we couldn't even have conceived of back then. Currently, the internet is provided to my computer wirelessly through the air. The AIR. No wires, no phone line, no cables or carrier pigeons, just air. My cell phone takes pictures in as high a resolution as my digital camera and can send those pictures via email almost instantly to anyone in the world. From the cell phone. A device no bigger than a deck of cards does all the things that an entire deskload of equipment could barely accomplish, with the help of a phone line, back in 1993 and then some.

And while we're on the subject, I got my first cell phone in 1996 which was large by today's standards but still portable. However, I remember the earlier incarnation that was bolted into the frame of my mom's car and relied on the substantial electrical production of the car's battery to operate. All it did was make phone calls, and it didn't even do that very well. Today, even the largest phones can fit in your pocket and weigh so little that you forget that it's there and sit on it a couple of times a day.

My point is that it is important to remember that the technology that we are becoming increasingly dependent on is still in its infancy and therefore cannot be expected to always do the things that we are asking it to do without some occasional bugs, errors and/or mishaps. We need to exercise patience when using these devices as they are absolute marvels of electrical engineering and technological advancement that we now, less than 20 years after their inception, take for granted as ubiquitous instruments of our daily lives.

Keeping all of this in mind, I am now a little embarrassed by the fact that my phone is on the floor in pieces because I threw it on the ground because the GPS program didn't determine my location as quickly as I would have liked while I was trying to use the phone to check email, send a text message, watch a movie, call my mom and order a pizza all at the same time--while driving. In retrospect, it seems like the phone's sluggish performance may not have been completely the device's fault...