For the record I am 57. I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1954. It was the year and place of the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown vs. Board of Education. There may have been color TVs somewhere, but not at 4501 Lakeview Road. That came several years later. This was long before fax machines and cell phones (even the ones that came in unweildy bags like some kind of WWII radio used to call in air strikes.) Computers? Fugetaboutit! Xeroxed copies? I still remember being teacher's pet (true) and getting to take the test to the school office so it could be copied on the mimeograph machine. Ooh, that smell! My grandmother's phone was on a party line, not a wireless network. It was oh so tempting to listen in on one of her neighbor's calls, and perhaps I did just that. At school we didn't have DVDs, although we did get DPT shots. We saw the occasional "movie" in class, but we were more likely to watch a film strip. The most hi-tech thing I can remember was going to the YMCA (where old men still swam naked) and watching a film about the Olympics that was threaded into the projector backwards. We kids roared with laughter when the pole vaulter flew out of the pit and grabbed his pole, returned to earth and sprinted backwards to his starting position. Ha-ha! I'm laughing right now just thinking about it. Near the end of my high school years Pong was introduced. It was the first "video game" I guess. Über low-tech by today's standards, but we had been tilting at Pinball machines for decades, so it was a quantum leap forward.
So why this trip down memory lane? Well, I guess I have been thinking about today's kids, including my own, and contemplating how the digital age has changed their lives so dramatically, for better or for worse. Youngsters today are known as "digital natives." They've never known life before the Internet. Never known life without a cellular lifeline. Never known life without video games so lifelike, they become reality for some. And I have noticed that the digital natives have developed a sixth sense. I call it Phonar. It's kind of like sonar (which dolphins use on porpoise - insert groan). Put me in a noisy restaurant and call me. Odds are good that I won't answer. But put my kids in a football stadium with a decibel level of 120 and they'll never miss a call or text. Put them at a bar full of loud drunks and they will answer any text or call. It's uncanny the way they intuitively know when a friend has pinged them on their smartphone. It's Phonar, a sixth sense that is common to digital natives that allows their brain to pick up whatever waves are emitted by cellular phones. They don't even have their ringer turned on! And I have seen my daughter instinctively reach into her purse to grab a call, so don't tell me it's the phone vibrating. I can't do it. I know my wife, Carol, sure as heck can't do it. Harvard or ACC should grab some grant money and research this phenomenon. Oh well, as Robert Earl Keen puts it "will there be wireless in heaven, or do I go to hell?" Hell if I know!
Interesting you would open with Brown v Board and not go there. You are right, the technology changes and people adapt. Our grandparents wrote letters and found long distance calls too expensive. Had they organized their thoughts more quickly they could have accomplished much before the post 3-minute tolls set in. You, me or folks of our generation would have no problem saying anything necessary during a 3-minute dialogue in a quiet venue. Yet it our children who will be able to do it anytime and any place.
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