I love technology. Almost as much as I love sharing my feelings about technology with anyone who's willing to listen (a dying breed). In a nutshell, I feel like technology has finally caught up with me. Almost every contraption I ever wanted when I was younger is now available.
Granted, there still aren't flying cars, but unlike most futurists, I never really saw the appeal of requiring your average driver to think three-dimensionally. I've already reached the age where I leave my blinker on for another 50 miles after changing lanes; adding "up" and "down" blinkers to the mix is just scary to me.
For the things that matter to me, though, technology has reached its zenith. I grew up in an age where TV offered three networks and four local stations on a 25" screen. If I wanted to catch an old movie that was being broadcast at 3 am, I had to set my alarm and prop my eyelids open with toothpicks to watch it. My music resided either on flat vinyl discs or cassette tapes, both which transformed into something horrible if exposed to sunlight. To contact someone when I was away from home, I could a) show up at their front door and slip a note through their mail slot (which functioned as an all-clear signal to those inside); or b) use something called a pay-phone. These devices were always located in front of a convenience store or by a gas station in the less-supervised parts of town. If you were fortunate enough to find the one out of five that worked, you usually had to wait in line until the local grass-roots pharmacist conducted his business, and then dip the handset in alcohol before you used it.
To find out how to get somewhere in my car, I used a roadmap. This was a folded-up piece of paper in my glove compartment that quickly expanded to the actual size of the city it referenced. If the map didn't work, I'd ask directions from a local. Just kidding... my Y chromosome makes me incapable of asking directions. If I couldn't find my destination, I'd spend the rest of the day trying to fold up the map until the police found me and took me home.
And of course, to do any sort of research, I had to go to a library and learn the Dewey Decimal System so I could decipher the data contained in the card-file drawers that would lead me to the book that had an index to point me to the page I was looking for... I get exhausted just recalling the process. I remember asking a librarian to show me where a book was that would teach me how to look things up. She led me to the "irony" section.
But now, there's really not much more I'm looking for in technology; the current state of the art coincides with virtually all I want from it. I can timeshift TV. I can take movies home, or have them squirted through a cable right to my house. My phone goes anywhere, and there's a little machine in my car that tells me how to get to my destination (though it still hasn't solved the blinker problem). My personal music collection is contained in a device that can fit (if not survive) in my hip pocket. And thanks to a house full of desktop and portable devices, the internet is never far from my fingertips. Thanks to the web, I've finally reached the stage of development my dad always feared I would attain: I have access to just enough information to make me dangerous.
As great as things are now, there's still a problem: what do I do when I travel and want to take most of this great stuff with me? When I'm taking a road trip, I can throw it all into a bag or directly into the trunk of my car, but that eliminates easy accessibility and having all that technology co-mingling just invites the formation of a Skynet or Colossus: The Forbin Project. Flying presents an additional obstacle. Making it through the airport security checkpoint was a challenge for me when my personal baggage consisted of 87 cents in change. Now that I have all this stuff, I usually have to allow a couple of extra days just for the quality time I'm going to spend with the NTSB.
But I recently ran across something that promises to address this problem, and I'm dying to try it out: the ScotteVest.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton