it's amazing to think about how quickly technologies are advancing. i played my parents records a kid. i made mix tapes from the two deck radio and cassette recorder. i carried around a walkman. i had to make detailed plans about where to meet friends and at what time, because there were no cell phones to keep constantly abreast of changing circumstances.
when i started at university i stored files on floppy disks, but they didnt hold enough information (264 kilobyte (kB)), so i used a zip drive for about a year before it very quickly fell out of favor. i used these technologies only 10-12 years ago, and yet they are completely obsolete. now i have an external hard drive for my work that stores a terabyte (1 TB = 1,000,000,000 kB) of data!
just a few generations ago people used pretty much the same tools throughout their entire lives. but my grandparents went from radio to color television to men landing on the moon to cell phones, etc... no wonder they get confused and frustrated when we ask them details about their wireless internet and wonder why they cant just look up the answers to things online, or intuitively figure out how technology works. most people that age do not have the same technological intuition as that of a 4 year old i watched recently navigate her way through her mother's iPhone. what will be "normal" for that 4 year old girl when she is my age?
in the video below, young kids are given old technologies to look at and asked to guess what the are. my favorite part is when they interpret the old 45. not many people play records anymore, but i still love their crackling sound and the childhood memories of laying on the floor in our basement listening to the beatle's abbey road.
anyway, enjoy as you laugh and cringe...
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
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