Times change …a short story on looking to the future
Posted on May 9th, 2008 in Reflection, fun |
Some time ago I blogged about the great little book ” Who moved my cheese” which deals with people and how they cope with change in a humorous but thoughtprovoking way. Today I read this post by Jo entitled “Who moved my mouse” which made me smile too..
No matter what you do for a living or how you are living your life the future is here now. Jo’s story is on the face of it about technology but is essentially about using the resources we have now to live our lives. The endless debates about accessing Facebook at work for example often miss the point. Social media is very much a part of how people live now - so much better to work with it than resist?
While travelling with friends at the weekend we listened to CDs of 70s music and commented on how inane the words of the songs were ( we could remember them well enough to sing along though). I recall my father talking about “that noise” as I listed to my transistor radio. He talked about the melodies he listened to on 78 records ( the kind that shattered into 100 pieces if they were dropped). I listen to ( and dance to ) hip hop although I don’t have an ipod ( yet). I am happy now to admit that I love a lot of the “old” stuff Dad did but listening to it on CD or online….no going back.
I see that you can buy a player for the old vinyls that many of us 50 somethings may well have stashed in the attic. There is a growing industry based on nostalgia but - for fun.
It would be interesting to fast forward the little guy in Jo’s story to see what he hankered for when he is 50 - maybe the technology to do that is here already?
6 Responses
Thanks for the pingback.
Like Ben Zander, I think we are going into one of the most exciting 30 years’ in human history. I suspect in 30 years, today’s world will be as amazing to look back on as 1910 say. I hope I am still here to see it!
You might like my ode to baby-boomers that I put up. Rilke poems often seem negative on first reading. He just makes the point well that, to enjoy life, our imagination needs to be fired up! The advantage of being older is that everything we see and hear is textured - when we are younger everything is starker and bolder - lovely then but having depth to our experience is also fantastic.
Jackie, you put a big smile on my face with this one.
I was just online checking out one of those combination turntable/cassette players that digitizes records and tapes and puts them directly onto a CD. My LP’s aren’t in the attic; they’re on the bookshelf in my office and lure me away from my taskiness:-)
Now, then next step is to convert 5,000 hours of big band music that I have on reel-to-reel.
The story of the little kid and the mouse really is powerful. My dad worked for RCA and would come home regularly with new technological goodies hot off the press. I still recall him walking in with the 45 rpm record player; the one with the big, thick center. We asked him what that was for. He said, “Well, we’re going to start producing records with big holes in the middle.”
So, we had one of the first 45 players, but with nothing to play.
What did we do? We started pulling on the spindle to see if it would slide off so we could play some ’78s.
The spindle was our mouse.
Wow - your Dad worked for RCA - how cool is that!
My own Dad has never been stuck for a solution and I feel that there will have been many “mouse moments” in our household now that I think about it.
Thanks for this Steve
You’re absolutely right about how inane it is to debate about the value of this or that technological advance.
I remember there were a number of large companies at the start of the century who did not have websites. Obviously they had to be convinced by the enlightened among them that they needed a web presence. Now, 8 years into the century, you’d be hard pressed to find a company that does not have a website.
Schools are another place where battles are raged between tradition and technology. Wise teachers, however, discover ways to incorporate Twitter and other tools into their teaching.
As for music, I knew I had crossed some type of threshold when I started to actually like the blues–a genre I abhorred when my parents listened to it.
[...] Times Change–A Short Story on Looking to the Future Cameron explores how we look at music and other things differently in retrospect. [...]
Flora - thanks for your comment. I remember being one of the first in my organisation to have access to the internet and being given the chance to try it out at the same time as colleagues telling me it wouldn’t last! That was only about 10 years ago!!