Growing up, I distinctly remember my father’s indestructible Nokia phone with its chiptune ringtones, chunky and/or corded home phones, clunky game boy colors, and MTV (which was primarily still music). Somewhere between elementary school and middle school, there was a transition to flip phones with t9 predictive text and Blackberry phones, which were the first phones that I remember having a full keyboard. There were iPod Classics, the stick iPod Shuffle, and there was Napster or ripping songs from CDs to put music on devices. There were game boy advances, and then the game boy advance SP with the built-in backlight, which was cool because it flipped closed like a phone. Notebook computers were meant to be easier to carry around than the clunky laptops of the time. There were text message limits per month, and everything was directly corded or it wouldn’t work.
When I was a teenager, AIM was popular, with its corresponding profiles (Bebo, which was like a catch-all for the transition between MySpace and Facebook); Facebook was gaining popularity; MySpace was fading away; Limewire was huge after Napster disappeared; iTouches were a big thing because “there’s an app for that”. The big gaming consoles were the PS2 and PS3, the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii,
and the fast evolution of the DS/DS Lite/DSi. Large flat screen/plasma screen TVs were a status symbol (even though they weren’t actually flat yet, and they had tobe wall-mounted). Wireless connections were the new rage, replacing cords and wires with wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC data transfers (when they actually worked). Apple Computers worked on thinning down their MacBooks to end up with the Macbook Air and the iPad. A popular argument was Mac vs PC or Android vs iOS. Monthly text message limits became a thing of the past as 3g wireless data came onto the scene, being replaced by monthly data caps.
Currently, popular social media is expansive with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Snapchat, and secure messaging applications. Nearly everyone has a smartphone now, as alternatives are hardly available. Popular video game consoles are the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo’s 3DS XL and the yet-to-be-released Switch. The speed of data delivery has drastically improved with LTE connections for cell phones and more expansive choices for internet services speeds from companies and better hardware. Smart watches and other wearable tech are “the cool thing now”, it’s like having an iPod Nano on your wrist. Tech companies have been trying to create flexible screens as thin as credit cards — everything needs to be ultra thin!
From when I was very young compared to now, the contrast in technology is stark. If I could see myself sitting in college using a touch-screen phone, typing on a 13-inch computer with a 121gb of solid-state storage when I was a child fascinated by my father’s Nokia brick, I would have thought it a work of science fiction. The advent of mobile data and the advance of wireless connections are likely the pieces that have caused the biggest changes in daily life. These changes have made us more mobile-oriented and enabled instant communication in a way that people could only have dreamed about twenty years ago. Try imagining, in the 90s, someone watching a live political debate, and being able to fact-check it themselves, in real-time. Having a “computer room” in a house has been rendered obsolete now, with technology being so portable. No one has to wait for a time during the day when no one needs to use the phone to use the internet. Dial-up died out in most places long ago.
Personally, technology changed my life drastically. When I was in fourth grade, I received my first flip-phone, and I have had a cell phone ever since. My first step-up from a flip phone was a slider phone in eighth grade, a trade-up from T-9 predictive text to a full keyboard. I then ended up with my first smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S (the original) during my Sophomore year of high school. All of the functionality and distraction of a computer in my pocket! I ended up switching back to a slider phone for a while just as no-contract phone plans were emerging, and then returned to a smartphone after graduating high school, after the evolution of no-contract phone plans.
By far, the largest change I have noticed in my life based on technology is access to information. In middle school, it was the cool thing to text “Ask” questions and almost immediately get a response with the answer. Now, you can verbally ask Google a question and receive an answer instantaneously. While it is still useful to know how to look up information in libraries and use indexes in books, computers have made information available with minimal effort, which we take for granted.
With this ease of access to information comes an overwhelming amount of stimulus in the form of entertainment and advertisements. Often, to reach content an individual would like to view, it is required that a few ads will be seen along the way. Ads are used to pay for anything that is “free” on the internet. With the installation and use of advertisements everywhere, the internet can be a vastly overwhelming place. This, coupled with the speed at which individuals can access new information has increased demand for new content in all fields exponentially. Demand for news, music, videos, and anything else expendable on the internet has increased to the point where many professionals refer to the new interaction with information as the ADHD age. The more stimulus people have, the more they crave.
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