"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht
"Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine." - Robert C. Gallagher
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When my closest friend was married some 27 years ago, I was invited to be his best man, and at the toast offered these words, pithy as they seem to me now: "About the only constant in our lives is the incidence of change". To this day, I can't be entirely sure if I coined the line or inadvertently copped it from someone else. What the hell; I was 23.
Since then, as a guy who's spent his entire life in telecommunications, I've been blessed to have a front-row seat for the greatest technological change in human history, the evolution of the Information Age. Think about it; at that time, I worked as a customer-service rep for New York Telephone Company on a computer that was cutting-edge; the conventional network architecture at that time was to have basically "dumb" user terminals retrieving information from a central source of data.
Son #1 now has significantly more computing power in his $99 cell phone, and it ain't even close.
I have lived through more technological change already than my dad did, and he spent 36 years in the telecom business. My children will see exponentially more of it than I will. It is ever thus, and to rail against it is a waste of time and energy.
It does lend itself to some amusing observations, though.
About two years ago, Son #1 and I are spending some time at the ballfield, doing some pre-season cleanup with a couple dozen other hardy souls. Time is passing, and we're nearing the end of our shift as we walk into the concession stand for something to drink. I'm standing with a few members of our league Board when I notice the time, and ask my son to go to the phone on the wall, and call Bride to advise her we'll be home in about 20 minutes.
He turns, and freezes. "Dad, how do I do this?", he asks.
The phone in question is a rotary-dial job, and my then-12 year-old had neither seen nor used one before. The other adults & I had a nice chuckle over that, the comments basically centering around, "GOD, we're getting old."
Even the simple enjoyment of music has undergone radical change; when was the last time you bought a CD, or, God forbid, an "album", even if you can find one? The digitialization of everything has led us to take for granted that change is permanent, and is universally beneficial.
There, we better stop for a moment, and take a breath.
Nothing is ALL good, with the possible exception of the love of one's family; into everything a little rain does fall. For example, technological change brings us the ongoing evolution of the computer; it also can make us so dependent upon it that new types of "cyberwarfare" may well define the next great battlefield. Digitization and miniaturization allows me to store my entire music collection, in unmatched fidelity, in my shirt pocket; it also allows me to secretly observe your actions using almost exactly the same technology.
Technology allows me to put the debatable wisdom of this blog onto the Internet; it's still incumbent upon you, however, to determine for yourself whether or not I'm completely full of crap.
So, what's the point of all this? Change is real, it's omnipresent, and it is not going away. We can embrace it, we can rail against it; let's just make damned sure we approach it with a little balance.
Until next time,
Excelsior!
