Heart and Mind

Just like on the Jetsons...

It's hard to believe that you still sometimes find people who are "anti-technology" and denounce the computer as being geeky or trendy, or they simply don't care whether or not the computer plays much of a role in their lives.

I think the thing that really separates the last decade from the years that came before it is that somewhere in the late 1990s, the computer actually started becoming everything it was supposed to always have been in terms of its usefulness. You see, we had computers in the 1980s. The Commodore 64 was all the rage circa 1985, but the knock on computers back then and for a long time was that despite claims that they made life easier, they actually made life harder for many people. They were less reliable and they couldn't do as much, and they certainly couldn't do it as efficiently. It was way easier to carry a 89-cent pocket calendar and a pen then it was to mess around with some slow, clumsy computer date book that would inevitably fail in more ways than one.

Then all of a sudden, things started changing and computers actually did make our lives easier and we could do more.

Now, I would have said this 8 years ago and meant every word I said. But things have continued to grow to the point where it's actually getting scary how "space aged" we're getting.

Spaced aged? Yeah. I'm talking about serious sci-fi, futuristic stuff that's been incorporated right into our daily lives.

We've got phone calls anywhere and everywhere as a matter of routine, much like Maxwell Smart used to communicate through his shoe-phone or Dick Tracy through his wrist watch.

And speaking of wrist watches, my boyhood fantasy of being able to have a "television watch" that would allow me to watch TV in school or in my parents car has basically been realized with iPods. (Despite the fact that this has all happened quickly in the grand scheme of the history of man, in the day to day It's happened gradually enough that we all may not have stopped to marvel at how incredibly cool it is to be able to watch stuff on an iPod.)

But what really blows me away the most is video chatting, which if you don't have the means to do it yet, you will soon. While we should have been impressed with the fact that we could do it for the last few years via a decent Internet connection and a relatively cheap web cam, what's really impressive is that this stuff is becoming "standard" and not even something we have to go out of our way to experience. To illustrate, consider that my new laptop comes with a built in camera and mic and integrated video chatting software. And chatting accounts (like AIM) are free.

But do you know what's most impressive of all? It's that this shit works amazingly! There is no lag, there is nothing difficult about setting it up, and it's every bit as advertised.

I had seen the video chat stuff before when other people used it and I looked over their shoulders and poked my head on camera. But now that I've actually sat down and used on my own, what's truly amazing is that there was absolutely nothing about the experience that was inefficient or labored or clumsy. It wasn't like talking to a screen at all; rather, it felt like the person I was speaking with was sitting right in the room with me. I was on a wireless lap top, as they were, so we weren't in some stuffy computerized (i.e., geeky) environment. We were both sitting on our living room couches with our spouses sitting nearby. Since it was instantaneous, the flow of conversation was just like a live one: we could interrupt each other or gesture to make a point and—can I tell you?—it really felt like a normal conversation with someone who wasn't a seven hours away.

The point is, it wasn't at all geeky or computer-nerd-ish. It was just the computer seamlessly being part of normal life.

Yeah...a normal life like on the Jetsons. Remember how they had "vissa-phones" and it was like a cool fantasy to think that people could talk on the phone and see video? Folks, we're there! Granted, I think video conferencing has probably been around for a long time, but you had to probably be a top notch executive at some world-wide-mega-corporation to be able to enjoy such costly, technological privileges. Now, any jerk who buys a decent laptop can take part in this stuff for free. How friekin' cool is that?

posted by Steve @ 10:52 PM