At the moment, the Drudge Report features a giant red headline that links to this Wall Street Journal story. The Drudge headline reads:
GOOGLE SPIED ON WIFI
The linked story is interesting, but what struck me about the headline is that if it had appeared ten or fifteen years ago, it would have been complete gobbledygook. "Google spied on Wifi"? Why not "Blurtz Eavesdropped on Whatsis," or "Scoobydoo Peeked at Tra-La-La"?
Yet in a comparatively short time, both Google and Wifi have become part of our lives, known to almost every technologically literate consumer.
It's hard to remember a world without Google and Wifi, just as it's hard to remember a time before Yahoo, Amazon, iTunes, smartphones, laptops, home computers, microwave ovens, central air conditioning, video recording devices, cable and satellite TV …
Yet when I was a child in the 1960s, such things were either unknown or extremely rare. It wasn't until the mid-1980s that I bought my first home computer, a noisy, clunky box that would seem astonishingly primitive today. (It was a Xerox 820-II, which I bought for a fraction of its list price at a clearance sale.) I didn't have cable TV until around the same time. I didn't even have a color TV for the first few years after I finished college; I owned a 10" black-and-white portable with rabbit ears.
Prior to my first computer purchase, the most technologically sophisticated thing I owned was a Sony Walkman, which retailed for (I think) $200. The idea that I would eventually own an audio and video player no bigger than a credit card would have seemed laughable to me. Yet I have one now (a Creative Zen MP3 player).
As a kid, I was restricted to about five TV stations, some of which went off the air around midnight. If there was an older movie I wanted to see, I simply had to wait until one of the five stations decided to show it. There were no video rentals, no streaming video, no pay-per-view. When the movie did come on, it would be heavily censored and chopped to bits to accommodate the time slot and the commercials.
If your car broke down on a back road, you walked until you found help — there were no cell phones. If there was a heat wave, you opened all the windows in your house, turned on an electric fan, and sweated in your underwear. Or, if you had a window air conditioner, you and your family would crowd into the one air-conditioned room, shutting the door, and huddle there in the comparative coolness.
Even in extremely hot climates like Arizona, swamp coolers were probably more common than central air, which was still seen as a fantastic luxury.
These days people get excited about widescreen high-definition TV. When I was a kid, we got excited about color TV. Seriously. You could watch your favorite shows in color. It was a revelation.
Many of the things we routinely do today would have been science-fiction not very long ago. Surfing the Internet on a cell phone? Nuking a bag of popcorn? Making an unlimited number of free long-distance calls without a WATS line? Even cordless phones were unknown back then. God help you if you got stuck on a call while you had to use the bathroom, and the cord wouldn't reach!
It's easy to take all this remarkable progress for granted, but we shouldn't. We do live in an age of marvels, and I haven't even mentioned some of the most important ones, like the high-yield crops that are helping to alleviate hunger in less developed nations, and the Hubble Telescope, and CAT scans and MRIs, and industrial robots that are eliminating the painful drudgery of assembly-line work.
As I've said before, I'm a pretty big fan of materialism, as long as it is not taken as a comprehensive explanation of reality. In the appropriate context, materialism is an extraordinarily powerful outlook that has afforded us an unprecedented level of technological advancement, scientific knowledge, and personal comfort.
And now I think I'll get back to playing with my iPad …
🙂