Keeping up with the Dronses

Technology Changes and Woes

When I was a little kid, I was a TV watcher. Not a lot of television—my parents wisely wouldn’t let me—but enough to remember things like shoveling snow off the satellite dish to get a better reception. I remember throwing out VHS tapes because they had, as we said, “gone blippy”, and always making sure that they were rewound to the beginning after I was done watching them. On reflection, I have a lot of memories of the technology of my childhood, from the weird noises my phone played when one of my parents was on the internet, or recording my voice onto a cassette tape. However, to me, technology wasn’t an essential. As you can probably tell from these different memories, technology to me was a fun thing, not a necessity. My life was based around other things.

Nowadays, though, it seems you can’t get around having to use technology to navigate life. You have to go online to apply for jobs, to talk to other people, to shop, to take surveys, to see the weather forecast, or to get your paystub. Add to this the fact that the technology that you have to use to perform these tasks is constantly changing and you have a recipe for confusion, time-wastage, and money-sucking activity. On a non-essential note, even if you use technology just for entertainment, as I did as a kid, you’re still constantly having to switch and update computers, phones, consoles, software—the list goes on and on. That’s not to say that technological updates are never good; they can sometimes save or improve lives. But let’s face it, nine times out of ten, they’re as non-essential as buying the newest phone for storing your music playlists.

My childhood wasn’t all that long ago. So, what has changed?  Why does technology suddenly seem like such a necessity?  Part of it, I think, has to do with big companies and other organizations buying into it. Let’s face it, if the internet crashed today, there would be problems, because so much stuff, from hospital equipment to monetary transactions, relies on it.

In some ways, though, I think part of what has changed is our mentality. While you do need technology for some things—I won’t dispute that—it is, I think, not as necessary as we make it out to be. It’s a convenience (when it works), but sometimes it’s just as simple to go into a store with a resume as it is to go online and drop an electronic file into a box, then fill in ten “required fields”. It’s just as easy to walk down the hall and talk to someone as it is to send them an email. And let’s face it: sometimes it’s easier to call a tutor during their office hours than to send them a message and hope they reply soon.

Yes, keeping up with the Joneses—or, as I like to say when I talk about technology, the Droneses—isn’t easy. Sometimes it can’t be helped. But sometimes, it can be; when we think about our childhoods and say, “I wish it were still like that,” we have to realize that some of that change is on us. We can bemoan technology, but then we still spend way too much time a day staring at a screen. So, the next time you feel tempted to keep up with the Droneses, just take a second to ponder how necessary it really is.