A Story of Digital Change
Okay, so I don’t want to sound like I’m really old, and an old-timer saying ‘back in my day’… but seriously, back in my day… as a kid… people didn’t walk into street-poles because they were distracted by their phone! People didn’t crash their cars because they were too distracted texting. We would have said ‘what is texting?’.
Have you ever really stopped to think how much our vocabulary has changed over the past 25 years? We have words and phrases now that meant nothing in the 90s. Think of the movie ‘Encino Man’ starring Sean Austin (Samwise Gamgee of Lord of the Rings fame) and Brendan Fraser (from The Mummy) - okay so I am old – but put yourself in the shoes of someone who transports from the mid-1990s to today, not quite as far as Brendan Fraser did in the movie. What would they think of our Star Trek-like ways using a hand-held ‘tri-quarter’ of sorts to accomplish tasks?
Listening to artist Lizzo and her song Phone tells the story of how this poor girl has lost her phone, so how on earth is she going to get home? A resident of 1990 would wonder how you lost the phone in the first place, considering it is plugged into the wall, and then if you’re looking for it around the house, why do you need to get home? You’re already there!
Fast forward to now, we rely on our phones to catch rideshare services from wherever we may be to home (or elsewhere). Without it we are lost and cannot get home! We open an app, tell it where we want to go – we don’t need to tell it where we are, it already knows that; we don’t need to handover any cash to our driver, it has that sorted from our preferred payment method – and then we wait and magically a car appears, and we (hopefully) make it home. Tell that crazy story to someone from 1990! I can hear my mother telling me not to get in a car with a stranger.
So, let’s say I make it home safely… I need to let my Mum know, because you know, getting in a car with a stranger and all. Back in 1990 there was this cool thing called speed dial! You could store up to 8 phone numbers on the plugged-in telephone handset to make calling our closest family and friends easier. How do I get in touch with Mum now? I say, “Hey Siri, send Mum a text to say, ‘I’m home safe’”. I don’t even touch the handset with the 8 numbers stored waiting for me to press their button! I don’t even touch my mobile phone. I just say it. And it happens. At the other end my Mum gets a text to let her know I’m home safe. Back in the 1990s, who would have thought we could do that, apart from Robert Zemeckis?
These examples show that communication has changed significantly. Gone are the days we are stuck with communicating via a plugged-in device that stretches through the house and under the crack of the bedroom door, with siblings yanking on it to say it was their turn to use the phone. Oh yes, only one person at a time in the house could be on the phone, which is why…wait for it…call waiting was the best thing ever when it came in! That little Beep-Beep to let you know someone else wanted to get through could not be ignored, particularly as we didn’t know who was calling – that’s right, it was a mystery until you answered the phone.
In related news, the Roladex has died a swift death as the contact details have become ‘contact data’ on our phones. We don’t need to sit down in front of the TV with our new Anne Geddes baby calendar each year to write in all our loved ones’ birthdays through the year, and other key dates. They automatically recur on our online calendar, along with pre-populated public holidays. Contacts are stored on our phone (make sure it is cloud storage and not SIM storage, or you’ll pay the price next time you get a new phone!). Going back to the Roladex…what about…the Refidex!!! (Or the Gregory’s for our southern counterparts). This big old heavy book that we would buy a new version of each year, full of maps from different parts of the city, each with a reference that links it to another map. And we can flick from one, to another, to another and use a bunch of post-it notes to find where we are going…or we can put the address in our GPS. That’s right folks, our Global Positioning System…another acronym of the modern age! We type the desired address into the GPS and it tells us how to get there. This is the magic that talks to our rideshare app, or our pizza delivery app. It has been around for a while, but now we rely on it for everything. I think we probably wouldn’t know if we were in the bottom of the ocean or the middle of the desert without our GPS. We have become that reliant on it.
For a change in pace, let’s talk … music!!!! The day I went with my Dad to purchase our first CD player was such a marvellous day. We came home with our 2 x free CDs to listen to the same songs over and over and over again. So much better than those tape decks or record players. CDs? Our younger readers ask… A Compact Disc was the first type of digital data storage back in the 1980s, later moving to digital video discs (DVDs) depending on the content, and these replaced all our different types of tapes – music cassette (MC) tapes and videotapes, including VHS and Beta. While the replacement really occurred in the 1990s – we have already seen these become obsolete thanks to the streaming of both video and audio services. Think Spotify, Apple iTunes, Netflix, Stan, Disney+, Binge and the list goes on.
So, communication has changed, transport has changed, entertainment has changed, …and more than just passive entertainment in the forms of watching and listening. Video games are now more interactive than ever. Space invaders are gone people. Really, this game was basic graphics with the game responding to very simple movement commands – generally left and right – but who could keep up with that back and forth! Not only have video graphics capabilities changed, but the ability to stream and game in a live environment has taken this to the next level. Space invaders was one person, with one machine, and one ship shooting those dashy bullets. Now, gamers are online with an infinite number of other people around the world, visualising realistic graphics that look like actual people, and they talk through their headphones to other people playing the game. Why did this change? Memory capabilities, streaming capabilities, …and artificial intelligence advances. So many different reasons. But the reality is, our lives have changed because of it.
Why is this important to be aware of? Because the pace of this change is becoming faster and faster. Our lives are being impacted by these changes at exponential rates. It is very difficult to be able to function in society now without access to the internet and a device such as a smartphone, tablet or computer. Our lives are entwined with ‘The Cloud’ whether we want them to be or not. With so many aspects of society being online, everyone needs to have a basic level of digital literacy to be independent today. Digital literacy is not about knowing which buttons to click on, and in what order. It is more than this, and it includes being able to adapt to changes in technology.
It is our mission with the Digital Literacy Licence (DLL), to upskill as many people as we can to be digitally literate and media literate. This will be an ongoing challenge, but we are up for it! If you want to learn more about our DLL, drop us a line (well…an email is usually more efficient these days!).
Stay tuned for more on how technology has changed our lives.