It never seems to amaze me how fast technology advances. In the 26 years or so of my life that I can fully remember I have seen such a rapid advance of technology, but specifically in the world of human communications. You can’t walk around today without being connected to communications technology. I mean really next time you are in a public place, stop, look around, and tell me what you see…the lady walking by on her cell phone, the businessman or woman typing away madly on a BlackBerry, or the more tech savvy folks playing with their 1,000th downloaded app on their iPhone. (Yeah they have and app for that too.) And today this is normal.
Let me stop now and go back about 24 years to 1985. Look around again and it’s not there. Yeah cellular phones were around, but how many people really wanted to carry the suitcase that they came in around with them. Communication was much more primitive compared to the toys of today and I can only imagine what this must be like for my parents or grandparents generations, but again back to 1985. If you wanted to get in touch with a family member you could not sit down and write them an email, shoot them an instant message or text. You had two options, one, you call them on your local or long distance carrier (AT&T, SPRINT, NYNEX) and paid a ton to do so in many cases, or two, you sat down and wrote them a letter.
How many of you can actually say that in the last 5 to 10 years have actually sat down and hand written a letter to someone? I know for myself it has been years, up until I had started working on my Master’s degree last year it had been a few years since I had hand written anything at all. When I started taking hand written notes again I had found that my penmanship resembled something along the lines of what you would expect to see in 2nd or 3rd grade classroom, not from a 28 year old man.
Needless to say I have spent the last six months trying to restore my penmanship to something a bit more respectable, but I am left wondering, what happens to the next generation? As we move further into the computer age will they even continue to educate children on the art of writing or will it become and an antiquity much like the stone carvings of the ancient times? It seems as if we are finally marching towards Adolus Huxley’s Brave New World.
By the year 2029 will even still need to have phones or even leave our homes? A great example of what is coming is the SecondLife world; people are staying at home and conducting their business in a virtual world –from Concerts to business conferences. It may come to the point where people are never familiar with the real you, but will have extensive knowledge of the virtual you that has been created.
I am sure that for now old fashion handwriting will hang around for at least another hundred years or so, but its popularity and legibility has and will continue to decline.
And so I end today with a quote, since I mentioned Huxley I only feel it appropriate to give him the last word:
“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue-liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny."- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
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