This and That

I thought certainly that I was very up on media and had a pretty good handle on it. After all, I had made the convergence from dial up to cable, played Xbox a time or two, and got a cell phone and upgraded. As a teen in the 1980's we were the MTV generation, when it actually had  music and VJ's. Not everyone had a VCR or Betamax, and we only had one television in the entire house. Cartoons played only on Saturday, the closest thing to reality TV was Candid Camera. As a teen of the 80's I had witnessed first hand the violent shrug into the technologic world, and the mentality people had of gadgetry.

Recently, I needed a new laptop for school , so I was obliged to make a visit to one of the big multimedia stores. It had been at least a couple of years since my last visit, as evidence by the fact I had no idea where anything was kept any longer.

While Browsing through the laptops, I was surprised to see how different everything was.  The staff were  eternally patient, not one eye rolling, as I treated them to a barrage of questions; What’s the difference between a 700 dollar laptop and a 300 dollar one, they all look the same to me; What are all these slots on the computer and what’s an expansion port? Since when did the CD section shrink to one aisle? Speaking of CD's since when did movies come in a case that was as small as a CD? It finally dawned on me that there were major changes going on and I had missed the electronic age. I looked at my old flip cell phone, and it corroborated my sad foray into technology. I had missed the boat.

But what did I miss? I had a hard enough time buying DVD's, I had them all on video why would I spend money on the same movie for another contraption? Gameboys of old were out the window, replaced by higher tech, virtual ones with hand motion. One line stuck in my head on one of the videogame posters  that stated" Never stop playing". In that one sentence, I realized that I didn’t really want to be a follower in the electronic age. At some point you have to stop playing and start living. I am just as happy for now not to have a constant barrage of email on my phone. I am fine with basic cable and no TiVo, If I miss it then I probably had something fun to do, like hang out with the kids and grandkids in the backyard watching the planes go by.

Computers and technology are now essential to our lives, but don’t have to run our lives. It sure would be great to have a thousand lives like the video war games, but reality is that choices we make shape what our future is.  I am sure somewhere we can smell virtual air, but its much better to partake of the real thing.