Disconnected to ALWAYS Connected

Thinking about all the ways technology has changed throughout my life I think about cell phones, transportation, medical practices, different forms of entertainment (music, TV, movies) and overall, how we communicate. All of these things and more have greatly changed throughout my past 22 years and one of the major technologies for me has been things I can use to communicate with others. This made me think about how technology has changed and shaped my communication.

Rewind to my childhood through elementary school and I am struggling to think of many ways of routinely communicating anyone other than seeing my immediate family at home and kids and teachers at school. Certain technologies that come to mind that have greatly changed that I enjoyed were VHS tapes, DVDs, dial up computers, some 90s computer games, and CD players, but not any routine form of communication.

Middle school came around and AOL accounts and Gmail were past times after school for talking with friends. I definitely didn’t spend as much time talking with friends on these things as others but I’m sure that if I really tried I would be able to find some cringy email chats and chain mail. I would have friends call the home phone and the caller Id would tell my parents it was for me. I didn’t get a cell phone until the end of 8^th grade and it was a beautiful . . .  flip phone. At some point, I remember having a plan with 200 texts for the entire month and I remember not wanting to have useless conversations with people if I didn’t want to use my texts up.

This first flip phone lasted me through the beginning of high school and never again did I have friends call my house to ask if I wanted to hang out. Freshman year I made a Facebook. I was really late to the FB game but this was the first time I was able to connect with friends from a school much larger than my middle school and learn about other people’s lives without actually even meeting them. Sometime throughout high school I also got a smart phone and all the messaging and social media apps that went along with that. I never needed anything more than a smart phone to communicate after that but definitely had countless more options than less than 10 years earlier.

Today, I use social media more than I’d like to and still mull over the question if I want to connect something to my Fb account or let an app access my contacts and location services. I definitely rely on digital devices and social media for communication and, although there are sites, apps, and digital technologies that I often try to limit so it doesn’t totally consume my life, there are a couple of ways of communication that I am thankful for. I can message my host sister in South America, relatives in Hong Kong, talk to my parents out of state on a mediocre phone carrier, and Skype my brother and friends whenever I want over countless different apps.

This world has become so much more connected in the past 20 years through incredibly useful ways.

Now, I can’t help but kind of shake my head at these kids in elementary school who have all kinds of social media accounts, a cell phone, and probably other family digital devices that they use at home. Where will we be in the next 20 years?