Thursday, October 29, 2009

The connected family

It started with a phone line. Then it became the cordless phone, the cellphone. Then came the dial-up connection to the Internet, a DSL line (or Cable), Satellite or Fiber. Personal Computers, then desktops, notebooks and netbooks. Now everything is converging. We schedule our TV recordings using the smartphone from our favorite Java cafe, we connect with our friends 1000s of miles away via Facebook for Blackberry while checking prices in the dairy isle at the local grocery store. We sent a quick email to work before going to bed... The Internet is everywhere now and the use of it has evolved in strides previously unthinkable.

How are we ever going to explain to our children (those born after 2005) that there was a time that mail involved paper, pens, envelopes, stamps and - in case of US to Europe relations - at least a week of transit time? They will simply look at us with unbelieving eyes while blind-video-texting their friends on whatever device will be the rave in 2015.

Since the connectivity-train has gone from the commuter slow-poke to the Hi-Speed, 200mph+ comfort wagon I'm not even going to guess what the next 10 years have in store... I just hope we can somehow keep up and a little ahead of our children so us parents can at least pretend to know what our kids are doing and have access to.

P.S.: Both Jen and me now have Blackberry's. Can't believe how attached we already are to them. Hasn't even been 2 weeks... yaiks!

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