The moments technology has taken away
Technology gives. It has given us a lot. The ability to connect and communicate with people we've never met who are thousands of miles away. To express ourselves. To fight illness and keep ourselves alive. It has given me my son.
But in our rush for self-improvement and more of everything, faster and better and instantly, there are some things that are either lost or soon to be lost forever. Moments and unique emotions that future generations will never experience. Call it change or call it progress, I look forward to telling my son all about them. Or at least trying to explain.
I will tell him about the feeling when:
You learn handwriting at school and get your first plastic fountain pen. The kind that you fill with those plastic tubes of blue ink that get all over your fingers and stain your pencil case.
You spend ages with your friends in Blockbuster choosing a film based on the video cases. But then when you actually get the film it's in a plain box anyway and somehow a bit of the magic is left on the shelf.
You collect an envelope of photos from the chemist. You open them and go through them quickly on the walk back home. There are always a few that are completely blurred or blank.
You hear this sound when you go on the internet. The clicks and beeps and whirrs as you dial up another dimension.
Your parents make you get off the internet because it's blocking the landline. They pick up the handset and all they can hear is static but you're in another world that they don't even know.
You phone a call centre and dictate a message to someone who then sends it to someone's pager that has a tiny display where the letters scroll across in caps.
You pop a CD into a Discman and hear it whizz up to speed and see the sliver flash by through the little Perspex bit in the lid.
You use a book of maps called an A to Z to get round London. The dense city unfolded in a little book you can hold in your hand. Folding the book as flat as you can because your destination is usually right in the spine.
There are many more moments like these of course. And there are many that we take for granted today but are destined to join the archive and be passed down in stories. The feeling when you fill a car with petrol and drive it yourself? The feeling when you smoke a cigarette? The feeling when you go to a cash point and withdraw paper money?
We can thank technology for giving us a way to record and share them.
