As a parent, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how differently my son will grow up than I did. For example, instead of a 30 minute car ride planned days in advance, Elijah can see his friends from his back yard. Instead of living in the woods, the woods are a place we visit.
But being a nerd, most of my thoughts center around his experiences with technology. My generation is the last one who ever wrote a school paper using both a card catalog and something online (or from the Encarta CD-ROMs.) It was completely valid to hear someone say they looked up a topic in the book because nobody had written about it on the internet yet. And I vividly remember a world with no internet at all. That’s going to sound like making fire with sticks to my kids, not to mention my grandkids.
I also wonder how much every parent feels this way. I feel like my generation was pretty lucky to have experienced the world with no internet, but still be young enough to quickly adopt it as it grew. What other generations have had experiences like this? Our grandparents rode horses and buggies when they were young but transitioned to cars. That’s probably comparable but it was stretched out over a much bigger chunk of their lives.
And as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, what really blows my mind is to think about what tech is going to be like in 30 more years. Remember, technology advances exponentially, not linearly. Think about tech 30 years ago and compare it to today. Now double or maybe event quadruple that difference and that’s what 30 years more will look like.
I wonder if I’ll still be blogging.
Card Catalogs
But being a nerd, most of my thoughts center around his experiences with technology. My generation is the last one who ever wrote a school paper using both a card catalog and something online (or from the Encarta CD-ROMs.) It was completely valid to hear someone say they looked up a topic in the book because nobody had written about it on the internet yet. And I vividly remember a world with no internet at all. That’s going to sound like making fire with sticks to my kids, not to mention my grandkids.
I also wonder how much every parent feels this way. I feel like my generation was pretty lucky to have experienced the world with no internet, but still be young enough to quickly adopt it as it grew. What other generations have had experiences like this? Our grandparents rode horses and buggies when they were young but transitioned to cars. That’s probably comparable but it was stretched out over a much bigger chunk of their lives.
And as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, what really blows my mind is to think about what tech is going to be like in 30 more years. Remember, technology advances exponentially, not linearly. Think about tech 30 years ago and compare it to today. Now double or maybe event quadruple that difference and that’s what 30 years more will look like.
I wonder if I’ll still be blogging.