Ted's Corner - On Technology
Electronics in Our Daily Lives - Friend or Foe?
A long time ago someone bashed together a couple of stones
near some dried grasses, saw a spark bring the pile to life,
and realized that fire was not just something that happened
when the gods got angry. From that point onward, technology
has been in the hands of mankind. For some, it has been
downhill ever since. But for others, technology has made
life easier and infinitely more rewarding.
 For early
man, the immediate friends and relatives of that "early
adopter" of fire making technology had a variety of choices:
they could fear fire (after all, it was responsible for a
great deal of destruction, and nothing good had come from it
before); they could use the fire someone else made; or they
could learn to make fire themselves. In not too many
generations, however, the technology was known by every
member of the group. 
Electronics are different. The next significant invention
after fire-making was probably thousands of years later. In the
electronic age, the next invention we're supposed to master
seems to come along every few months.
Years
ago, the joke was that someone had not figured out how to
program a VCR or a phone-answering machine. Before some
people got around to learning how to use them, both became
little more than quaint reminders of a bygone age.
For all
but the most gadget-savvy, the pace of change can feel like
an endless tsunami. Music went from grooves in a record to
bits of metal on a cassette tape. Then the CD replaced
everything and the entire medium was ripped apart. And
before the infamous non-problem of CD-rot could destroy
anybody's music collection, someone unmoored all those ones
and zeroes from the "album" format altogether, and overnight
the whole experience of buying music, and the whole industry
of selling music, changed.
Just when
one crop of suddenly old people stopped needing to ask their
kids to program the VCR, it seemed those kids had started
asking their kids to fix the home local area network.
There is
a solution to all that, of course: learning about what you
need.
An
electronics users' prayer would go, "Lord give me the
strength to research the technology I need, the serenity to
accept the technology I don't, and a teenage kid to know the
difference."
-Ted
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