Living With Technology

If you’re over 40, you may have noticed that the world has changed.

Personal technology has altered how we do most everything, from talking on the phone, to writing a letter, to doing research, to watching television. Once, we mostly knew how to do these things. Then computers, cell phones and the Internet changed everything and made us more or less incompetent in our day-to-day lives, unless, and until, we learned the new ways of doing things.

The speed, ubiquity and enormity of these changes have caused a revolution in how we live.

Younger people have absorbed the new ways of doing things almost effortlessly. Born into the new environment, the latest technology seems normal, perhaps banal, to them. Even the demise of the neighborhood and the rise of its replacement, Facebook, are changes that don’t raise eyebrows among the young. Older people may wonder whether to be concerned about this wholesale acceptance of rapid and radical change. They may also ask whether one can judge if the new arrangement is better if one doesn’t know what came before.

Maybe you think about these things. Or maybe you’re thinking more about whether to get an iPad now or whether to wait for the next model, or whether to switch from a Windows PC to a Mac, or whether another ISP would be less prone to inducing a feeling of rage than the one you have now. Either way, you’ve got plenty to think about.

I hope in this new blog to consider various aspects of personal technology, including how we live with it. What might the new iPhone look like? Would you be better off with an Android phone? What are the parenting implications of one’s child being able to use either type of device to talk and text throughout the wee hours of the night? (Sleep, it turns out, is an almost old-fashioned notion.)

Please check back for more.