THANK GOODNESS FOR TECHNOLOGY

As a member of the older generation I wasn’t brought up on technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI). There wasn’t all this face to face chatting over the phone, we were lucky if we had a telephone box at the end of the street and a money box of ‘silver’ on the hall table just in case there was an emergency.  To a large degree, we were oblivious to what was happening in the world beyond our street. We knew from listening to grown-ups that there was ‘stuff’ going on though. There were wars in other countries, disasters that would involve train derailments, aeroplane crashes, earthquakes, there were medical breakthroughs and such but we never really saw much of it as the television was for said grown-ups and newspapers were really of local news. The big tabloids though did receive news by telephone, by teleprint or from the early form of email on the internet if other countries around the world had access to such technology.

I suppose, as kids growing up, the world didn’t seem that bad a place really back then. There weren’t as many air disasters, earthquakes or plane crashes. There weren’t as many people being killed either by someone else or by accident or by some freak of nature. The weather systems seemed more stable and we didn’t seem to have as many ‘alternative’ high-powered people running the countries around the world.

Or, did we?

The fact is, we did. We just didn’t know it.  The world was turning as it is today.  As my generation entered their early twenties, the World Wide Web was only just coming into being. Mark Zuckerberg was still in short pants, facetime was time spent putting your make up on, twitter was something the birds did. Mobile phones and networks were just being built.

You could now chat to each other from the luxury of your car or the shop, anywhere really. Handsets got smaller for our pockets as all we did was call or text, but then they started getting bigger, more functions added. The world news was being brought to us in real time and we saw it all. We saw the damage; we saw the happiness. We scrambled to learn and be involved.

The young ones now embrace the technology, learn to do their own coding, applications are produced that count your steps, your heartbeat, pay the bills.  Children learn to read with technology. Technology is in our everyday life now. You can’t get away from it.

But imagine this Pandemic life without it. Now that would be sheer heart-breaking. We can at least see our loved ones.

I embrace it.

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