I was thinking about a conversation I had with my friend Colette about how technology has spoiled us. I half-jokingly said to her one day: I wonder what we did before iPhones? How we kept ourselves entertained? Nowadays, everyone and their mother has a smart phone. What’s the first thing you see people do when they are waiting for something or otherwise bored? Whip out their smartphone! I have several friends that act like their iPhone (or Galaxy, or Droid, or whatever kind of smartphone they have) is like another appendage of theirs and go through “withdrawals” when they are deprived of it. And if their phone is not working or is not working fast enough for them, they get annoyed very easily. I’m not immune to this myself - sometimes I feel naked without my phone. A year ago, I had a class where we had to cut ourselves off from modern technology for a week - that was probably one of the longest weeks of my life, and it made me realize how dependent I am on technology. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing - just an observation of mine. I don’t think any of us are immune to this, actually. Think about it - how many of us are not bothered by slow internet speeds and say something along the lines of “This computer is so slow!”, when much of what we do online was inconceivable even 15 years ago? What would we do if something wiped out or rendered us incapable of using technology? (You know, like you see in the movies and video games - a Dystopia.) Would we go collectively mad?
What spurred my train of thought was a tweet I saw tonight about how someone was playing Knack, the PS4 launch game, shortly after they finished The Last of Us. This person tweeted that he felt like he had gone back a generation, instead of going forward as he expected. Of course, most gamers (or other techies) know that it takes years for a console to reach its true potential and for developers to fully harness the power of the system (look at the the PS3 launch games, for example, compared to the games that came out near the end of its life like TLoU). I wonder if this is another case of technology making us impatient.
