Sunday, January 1, 2012

Is Technology Passing You By??

Sometimes I feel like I'm standing still and the latest technology is passing me by.  I am starting to feel a bit more confident texting, but I still prefer e-mail or Facebook as my electronic form of communicating.  When my daughter was about 2, she started using the computer.  Her little brother has followed in her footsteps. He can turn on our laptop computer, put in our password and start using it.  He can maneuver around the keyboard and knows the website addresses of his favorite websites - he's 7!! I can remember when I was growing up our family saving up for a computer I think called the, "Commodore 64."  Does anybody out there remember that one??  After some research, we decided to get an iPad 2 as a family gift to ourselves for Christmas.  My daughter had that thing up and running within about 10 minutes, it took me several minutes just to figure out how to turn it on!  Just like texting, my daughter was offering me  "lessons" on how to use the iPad.  That device is truly amazing. My son uses it in his class at school - there are terrific "apps" for kids with special needs - I'm sure my son already knows which ones they are! I have thought about getting a Kindle because I love to read.  I have gone back and forth about it and decided I like the feel of a physical book in my hands.  I'm kind of the same way about the newspaper.  When we moved from the East Coast to the Midwest a little over 10 years ago,  one of my favorite newspapers to read was the Washington Post. I tried to convince the hubby to continue to subscribe to the paper version, but his response back was, "just read it online!"  To me, it just doesn't feel the same. Over the weekend, one of the local bookstores where I live closed its doors for good.  It made me kind of sad to see that.  But, I guess it is a sign of the times.  There are lots of books you can read on a Kindle or a Nook.  You can even write your own book and Amazon will publish and sell it as an "e-book" within a couple of days.  Fascinating!  I'm one of those people that is kind of slow to change their ways. My family would even say I'm stubborn :)   I  recently figured out how to upload pictures to my blog with some level of confidence. I can remember before digital cameras, how my mom would send our rolls of film to a photo processing place and we would wait about a week and get them back in the mail.  Now, you take a picture and have it instantly.  My daughter told me a few days ago one of her textbooks is outdated, it still listed Pluto as a planet.  Information changes so fast, textbooks are outdated as soon as they are printed. When I was in high school you had to do your reports from books from the school or local library.  It blew my mind a few years ago when my daughter did a paper that required no books, only the Internet!  Her school doesn't send paper report cards, they are accessed online exclusively.  One electronic form of communication that I really like is Skype - we are able to have our weekly chats with my stepson which I think is really cool.  I still haven't figured out how it's free, but I'm not complaining.  I guess I'm going to keep trying to change with the technology - I don't have much of a choice!  Am I the only one out there that wishes technology would slow down a little and let me catch up??

2 comments:

  1. Unfortunately, there is no App for slowing down so we can catch up. I would love to be just a little more even, but I doubt that will happen.
    Auntie

    ReplyDelete
  2. I wish sometimes there was an APP for slowing down!

    ReplyDelete

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