I just spoke with my friend Harvey. He’s sitting in Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel.
I wouldn’t have known Harvey was away, except he saw me, sitting here in Connecticut, my Instant Messenger client open.
He mentioned someone in the conversation but wasn’t sure I knew who he was talking about. So, he sent a photo. We directly connected via IM. It didn’t matter that he was sitting at a Mac, while this laptop used Windows. It didn’t matter if either of us was technically adept.
I’m not bragging , You’ve probably done, or are doing, similar things on your computer.
When I step out on my back porch, I can ‘see’ a half dozen other wireless networks (most unencrypted). This is a neighborhood of 1+ acre lots. That’s a lot of connectivity… a lot of perceived value in networked computing.
It’s amazing the technology exists, is reasonably priced and widely available.
It’s not that my grandfather never expected to be doing this kind of stuff. He could not have even imagined device like the ones we’re using.
Could you have imagined Google 15 years ago?
All those prediction of the future I saw as a kid… those Jetson’s apartment towers and flying cars…. None of that’s reality. The information society we do have was never demoed to me.
Harvey will be home later today. Maybe I’ll track his flight.
In many ways, my 70-something mom is more net-savvy than I am. She is constantly surfing the web and wheeling and dealing on eBay; she searches for things on the web as well or better than I do.
It is amazing that a device smaller than a pack of cigarettes can be used as (among other things) a cell phone, audio player, web browser, digital camera, email device, instant messenger, alarm clock, and pocket watch. My smartphone does all these things.
If you had asked me 10 years ago whether these two realities would exist today, I would have said ‘no’. My mom used to say “I don’t like mouses” in her defense of using a keyboard and MS-DOS; her current machine now runs XP and she loves it. I still remember the huge handset and the huge box of electronics that “mobile phones” used to require.
when I opened my website design biz in ’96, I hoped the internet would take off, but even now I’m amazed at some of the things I’m seeing. Now we just need to keep up with it all!