Tandem technology
I was born towards the end of the postal letters era. By the time I was learning numbers and alphabets at school, we installed a bulky desktop at home. When my educational standard escalated to simple math, at home, we were building a permanent table for the monitor to sit on with an additional grove for its friend, the CPU. We didn’t use it much, though. The computer usually stayed covered in a big plastic bag, and we were only occasionally granted permission to use paint.
Sometime during my high school, we got a modem that gave us internet from the landline, and life as I remember it has never been the same!
Soon, we started taking school projects in floppy discs instead of stick files and eventually upgraded to CDs.
I acknowledge my privilege in experiencing cutting-edge technology as and when it became available. The credit for introducing us to the latest technology, a little ahead of my peers, goes to my dad. He had a palmtop way before any of us knew what it was or why one needed it. I always suspected he didn’t fully understand how to use it either.
When the whole world was embracing the bulky alpha-numeric keypad phones with yellow backlight, my dad bought himself a gigantic touch phone with a stylus and the works. All I knew about it was, it had one crappy game to get together balls of the same color and then burst them. Loved it! Other than that, I think it served the same purpose as the yellow-backlight phones, minus, of course, the killer battery life and its superior power not to be destroyed by mere mortals. We all strived to protect this fancy gadget on every occasion from food, liquid, weather, and occasionally ourselves.
Life has come a long way since then!
With the advances in the past few years, we are now able to effortlessly send money to the other end of the world within minutes, get in touch with a doctor for consultation and in some parts of the world, get the medicines delivered. We have come up with advances so crazy that not all of us are even aware of what is available out there, forget exploiting what is available!
Depending on whom you ask, each of us alive today has a story about when they realized technology today would not be the same as yesterday. For me, it’s getting the modem that is connecting us to the internet through the landline. Like, how?!
For some, it’s the silicon valley boom, the advent of smartphones, high-speed internet, or invention of productivity apps, and now, more relevantly, VR, AI, or ML, or any other newer two-letter abbreviations that I find difficult to keep up with.
With the invention and installation of WiFi in most households, fast, reliable, and affordable technology is literally available at our fingertips. And if the pandemic has shown us anything (other than the fact that people are more afraid of running out of toilet paper than a deadly virus), it is possible to study, work, create, earn and provide with just two things: internet and a device to use it. From here on out, we only move forward!
And now, after the disaster that was 2020, I am more humbled by the power of mighty technology in general and how much the internet furthers it. Less than two months into the pandemic, people turned to the indefinite internet access at their disposal and came up with novel ideas to use technology in all aspects, from making their life easier to minting money from the comfort of their home; or the safety of mountains and maybe even the luxury of a beach. To moving money within the market. To complete schooling without going to school. And finally, do that course you always wanted to. To mining hidden forms of currency. To financial automation and absurdly cool things called NFTs!
One of the personal (smaller, even minuscule compared to some) discomforts of the pandemic for me was being in a long-distance relationship. This distance helped me reflect on an incident from my childhood:
My extended, conservative, south-Indian family was hush-hushing about my slightly older cousin’s decision to move to the USA for education, but mainly to be with his long-term girlfriend. This was way back when letters were the only feasible long-distance communication ‘platforms’ because not every household had computers yet and international calls were expensive AF! And I remember thinking, this man is literally crossing the oceans to be with his love.
All I had to do to survive my long-distance relationship was switch from one app to the other since I am working on the laptop or phone throughout the day. We also had relationship apps at our disposable that would transfer a hug from you to your partner as a vibration when you held your phone to your heart. And not to forget VR, which can make you feel like you are in the same cafe together. Yet less than 20 years ago, my cousin had to uproot his whole life, and go to a new continent to be with his gal!
After surviving a long-distance relationship with the current cutting-edge technology, I am scared that this will be the dreaded age of long-distance relations and technology for teenagers less than 20 years later!
In the future, I foresee a teenager transmitting her systematically formed thoughts into her blog with a fancy hair clip-like-device that’s on her head, whatever it is going to be called, while talking to her couple-of-light years away partner about how she had an old cousin in a long-distance relationship during the pandemic of 2020. And they would be amazed by how in the ‘olden days’ relations survived without the intimacy of touch, all the while not realizing that they experienced intimacy with technology like dermal VR or better that is as foreign to our mind today as Skype probably was to my cousin!
