Technology Nostalgia

“1999 can be pinpointed as Precisely the Last Year of How Things Used to Be. We listened to music on stereos. We watched TV on TVs. We read books in books and newspapers on newspaper. We didn’t yet suspect that our desktops and laptops, lurking innocently in our workspaces and spoon-feeding us e-mail, were exerting a black-hole tug on our lives.”

— Adam Sterbergh, Remembering What Life Was Like on the Eve of the New Century, New York Magazine

Technology, particularly the internet, has rendered a whole range of things irrelevant to this generation. Instead of encyclopedias and dictionaries, we use Wikipedia and Google. We connect through Facebook instead of yellow page phone directories and snail mail. Instead of maps, we have GPS. Flicker takes the place of developed photographs. Print, in all forms are quickly being replaced by their counterparts on the web.

As a result, vinyl records, casette tapes, film cameras, rotary phones, typewriters and stamped letter envelopes have now become mostly mementos of the past. They have become retro cool, icons of the olden times. Older people miss it and younger people are amazed by it. To some, they symbolize total inconvenience. To others, they are symbols of quality, patience and skill. Some might even say, true talent and eloquence.

It is amusing to realize how much technology has become obsolete during all twenty-three years of my existence. At the rate it is going, technology development does not even seem to want to slow down. More interesting is the way people react to this; people in this era embrace technology freely and resist it all at the same time.

At this age when the average person struggles to upgrade his iPhone every chance he gets, why is technology nostalgia all around? True, all these developments have made life more convenient. But on the other side, these same developments have taken a chokehold over the quality of our work, our relationships, our lives.

How do we then strike a balance? Do you think technology should slow down or do you think people should just keep up?