Me, a Luddite? – A Wee Bleether

I used to give my dad a hard time when he’d ask for help to boil water in our microwave oven.

“What are you, a Luddite?” I’d tease, evoking 19th century English textile workers who fought the Industrial Revolution.

Yet here I sit, typing on an Apple laptop with a digital mobile phone at my side, bewildered at my personal tech progression:

Electric typewriters. Compact discs. Refrigerator-sized word processors. Cordless home telephones. Fax machines.

Personal computers. DVDs. E-mail. The Internet. Mobile phones.

Yahoo. An Apple iMac computer. Online shopping. Google.

MySpace. Facebook. And now, Twitter.

Oh, and programmable coffee makers. I wouldn’t be here without those. And VCRs that don’t blink “00:00.”

I hopped the tech treadmill right about the time computer nerds were coming up with crude but functional electronics for the rest of us.

Years ago, I stood awestruck in my college newspaper offices watching a lawsuit, filed in some distant court, peeling from the fax machine in shiny, scrolling sheets. Though barely legible in mimeograph blur, I thought to myself, “What did reporters even do before faxes? I mean, with deadlines, how did they do their jobs?”

DVDs brought actual joy: no rewind fees!

Colleagues and I complained about switching from computer stations connected to an all-powerful mainframe—which whirred away in a bright-white room with the best air conditioning in the office—to desktop computers that, we would soon learn, were doomed to crash more times than state District Judge Don Johnson.

A few years passed and Yahoo became part of my daily digital life. But now I only come across it a couple times a year, usually remarking, “Wow, they redesigned it again?”

“You’ll like this,” colleagues assured when I had to learn how to use a Mac. “Instructions? You don’t need instructions. You’ll just figure it out.”

And they were right.

“You mean to tell me,” I would ask many years on, “20-somethings don’t even have home phones? How can they live like that?”

Easily, it turns out.

During my adult lifetime we said goodbye to mystery. Any obscure fact or childhood memory, any long-forgotten TV character or vaguely recalled vacation spot, could now be instantly solved and resolved in vivid clarity on LCD screens.

And Digital TV? Two years into it and I already get frustrated when I can’t pause and replay real life to see what the hell just happened.

I was a Facebooker for about a month, but now I rely on Wifebook. Although far less extroverted than me, my wife is a disciplined, prudent and thoughtful Facebooker. “Honey, sorry to tell you but your cousin’s mother-in-law passed away.” WHAT?!

Even as you read this, some teenager on your street is exploring and sharing a new application or communication platform. Sometime next year you and I will discover how irresistible it is, and we’ll adopt it just as they’re abandoning it for a newer one.

An actual rocket scientist once explained to me the acceleration of new knowledge in our world, if charted from about 1800, begins in a nice, gentle slope until about the 1950s, at which time it pretty much spikes into a vertical juggernaut.

New stuff won’t just keep flying at us—it’ll fly at us faster and faster all the time.

How will we even live like that?