Yesterday I was on the phone with Apple Support. Even though I had performed factory resets to the Macbook Pro before, recently, I have had bad luck and screwing things up. This time around, I had decided to call Apple and get some professional help. If you are familiar with this process, you know that there is some downtime while waiting for things to happen, where the representative and I had some time to chat a bit. We were talking about the early days of the internet and how slow everything was, AOL, and all that fun stuff.
That conversation got me thinking about the differences in technology from when I grew up vs my girls' time growing up. I grew up having to get up from the couch to change channels. Having to deal with antennas on the roof. I remember when we first got cable, and it was the most fantastic thing ever. When we first got internet service in our house, dial-up internet, and coming back from school and logging into ICQ and or Messenger was the thing. Later it was getting DSL and that was the greatest thing ever! And so on and so forth, until today.
My girls will know nothing of that. All they know is that there is a magical box connected to the telly that shows cartoons, The Frozens, The Trolls, and The Spidermans. They don’t understand the concept of losing all that if the internet goes down. I remember one time Marley watching cartoons on the iPad, wifi only, we get in the car, we drive away from the house and the movie stops playing. She didn’t understand the reason or why her movie stopped playing. Now she knows. Luna, she’ll be two-years-old in a few days. She grabs the Apple TV’s remote and talks to it, she still doesn’t get that she needs to press the Siri button but she has the basic concept. They both talk to try to talk to both Siri in the HomePod and/or Alexa. With Marley having better luck with that, of course, and for now. Luna, at almost 2yo, she understands and can “drive” and iPhone or iPad as if was part of her everyday thing.
I am not sure how bad if at all, this can be. Maybe is just a byproduct of the times and it is what it is. Also, I am curious to see where things will be going moving forward. New technologies will arise and how kids– my kids – will interact and grow with them.
Curiouser and curiouser.
