I’m in my late twenties. I do not remember a time without a telephone. Yet it amazes me that I can sit at home, pick up the phone and talk to someone in Canada or India. I once called my then girlfriend (now wife) in England from a ship in the Caribbean Sea, via a satellite in space (mind you, it cost me £7 a minute)! I can get onto a plane and travel further in an hour than people 100 years ago could in a day.
And don’t even get me started on the internet. Yes, there’s a huge amount of rubbish out there, and sometimes I’ll never find what I want. But then, I’ll want the text of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Thirty seconds later (and that includes the time it takes to get to Google): Paradise Lost .
I want the lyrics to Orff’s Carmina Burana. Thirty seconds later (and that…you get the idea): Carmina Burana.
I’m on my way to work, idly pondering something I hear on the radio. I get to work post a question on the SDMB: Should gay couples be able to adopt?. Boom. Over 60 people have taken the time to add their thoughts and 800 have read (at least some of) it.
And yet, no one I know seems at all impressed with this. They all take it for granted.
So my question is, am I an anachronism? Please help!
I don’t think you’re alone. Often I take the internet etc for granted, then sometimes I am just SO amazed that can easily chat to people in the U.S.A. or in Tasmania. It plays merry hell with the sleep pattern though!
Nah, I’m constantly amazed at what we humans have a achieved. This internet thing - I can reply to you in an instant and I’m halfway around the world (well, I’m not to you, but I could be). When you think back - it really wasn’t very long ago that it was usual for a person to be born, live and die in their tiny part of the world and know practically nothing about the world outside it. Now, we have an incredible amount of information literally at our fingertips. It’s astonishing and amazing.
I’ll tell you how I do take it for granted though - I often find myself wondering why my book doesn’t have a “back” button. Heh.
Almost everything amazes the shit out of me. When I turn on the news, or listen to news on the radio, or read it in the paper… when I really try and get a feel for the world, all I can do is sit back and go, “With all this bullshit, how in the hell did we ever manage to have all the cool stuff we have?” Telephones, computers, calculators, watches(!!), lightbulbs… damn and blast, everywhere I turn is some technological marvel. Seriously. Look around and ask yourself, what on your desk could have possibly been here 50 years ago? Not my:
Phone, monitor, desk itself (not that they didn’t have desks 50 years ago, just not this material), computer… and don’t even get me going about when I get up to actually take a walk around!
It bothers me when people take even the simplest things for granted like that.
Hell no, the magic of the telephone still has me mystified. Even the radio is amazing to me! (And don’t get me started on the magic that is this, this, Internet.)
What also surprises me is the rate of change. Just think: the changes that have occurred in the past 100 years - political, societal, technological - easily dwarf the changes that occurred in the 500 (and probably more) years before that. In-fcuking-credible!
I’m with you (mid-thirties). Every so often I just go “good Lord!” at something most others take for granted. I call it “the alienation effect”, after Brecht. The first time I used a mobile phone I nearly pissed myself with amazement. And the internet: holy shit!
I’m a techie, and I have a pretty solid grasp of how all this stuff (TV, cell phones, the internet, etc.) works–yet the more I understand, the more it astonishes me.
The problem, you see, is overload. It’s not that most of us don’t notice, or that we take it for granted–it’s that if we really stop to think about it fully, it can send us into shock. Things have changed so fast that few people in the last several generations have really been able to keep up. Our seeming indifference is a defense mechanism, allowing us to deal with the changes piecemeal rather than in a huge lump.
I remember taking a long walk out of Albuquerque NM, out into the surrounding desert hills. On the way back I topped a shallow hill and saw the edge of Albuquerque off in the distance; planes were lifting off from the local airport and midtown buildings were visible above the general grey flat city terrain.
“Whoa, what an odd alien insect-species this is, check it out, a nest of humans!”
On the other hand, of course, in other ways medicine seems medieval in its crudeness. It seems to me, for example, that chemotherapy involves just poisoning the patient, and hoping that the tumour dies before the patient does. No doubt there’s more to it than that, but irrespective of how far we’ve come, we’ve got a hell of a long way to go.
Nerrie, you’re not alone in the amazement. Okay, so I’m 42 and a lot of today’s technology should astound me.
But I’m pretty much in awe of everything: television, rainbows, inkpens, trees, pretty women, the moon, whatever.
It is indeed an incredible Cosmos.
Love to All,
TN*hippie
P.S. Since I’m an old hippie with an ethanol addiction who likes spiders…does that make me an anachroholicarachniphile?
