THE OLD AND THE NEW

I  suppose that, like me, you have heard an “older” person say, “I don’t have one of those and don’t intend to.  I don’t even know how to turn one on, and don’t intend to learn.”  They may have been talking about a computer, a smart phone, and iPod or some other electronic gadget.

Yet, you can be sure they have in their house a television set, a telephone, a phonograph player (33rpm no doubt) and, possibly, a CD player.  All of these were new electronic gadgets in their day.  I can remember a few older relatives complaining back when I was a youth that they didn’t see any sense in having more than one telephone (the one in the hallway) in the house.  Mom later convinced them she could use an extension in the kitchen.  These same people were slow, even reluctant, to move from calling central to using a dial phone, and later, a push button phone.

Progress marches on and we’d better keep up or we will surely be left behind.  Our children and grandchildren are justified in thinking: You’re too old to understand.  Wait until you are younger.  For some of us do indeed act as if we are too old; our brains have solidified and we are incapable of learning anything more, which, of course, is absurd.  We are just being obstinate or lazy.

Not too many years ago, during our vagabond days in the Chuckwagon, my wife and I, along with others in a campground, lined up at the bank of pay phones waiting our turn to call home and check in with our family.  When we embraced the modern technology of cell phones, we avoided all the waiting in line.  Some people then said they didn’t understand cell phones and wouldn’t have one if you gave it to them.  Today, just about every senior citizen I know has a cell phone, usually two, one for the husband and one for the wife.  And increasingly, they are discovering what we learned at least ten years ago: we no longer need a land line in our house.  Since we travel a lot every year, it made little sense to have a land line back at the house that we seldom used.  Our cell phones went with us everywhere; friends and family and the doctor’s office, could call us anytime, anywhere.

Recently, my daughters, with the encouragement of one techo-savvy granddaughter, purchased for me an iPhone to replace my Blackberry phone.  It has many amazing features besides serving as a means by which I can place and receive telephone calls.  One of the more interesting is the face-to-face feature, the ability to talk with someone and see them at the same time.  A program called Skype allows you to do this on your computer, provided it has a web camera.  The iPhone has this built in with a front-facing camera that takes your picture as you talk and sends it to the person with whom you are talking – provided that person has the ability to receive such an image.

So what?  Well, for starters, that feature allowed my wife and me to talk face to face with our granddaughter, Leslie, who called from college the other evening to chat.  She was away from home for the first time and just needed to talk to and see a familiar face or two.  We had a very nice 20 minute conversation from our place in Colorado while she was in her dorm room in New York.  That’s special.

Equally special was the phone conversation, in face-to-face mode, with a high school friend who called recently.  We had not seen each other in over 10 years, but we had the opportunity to chat face to face while I was in Colorado and he was in Hong Kong, China.  He learned that I had a web cam and called to talk about our upcoming 60^th class reunion that he will be unable to attend.  I invited him to call again on the day of the reunion as I planned to have my computer and web cam set up so he could talk face to face with classmates at the reunion.  He promised to do so.  And I know of at least one other classmate who cannot make the reunion because of health reasons who plans to call that day as well.

Technology has always been a challenge for some, but we all get on board with the new gadgets sooner or later.  Some people, remember, resisted getting one of those new-fangled horseless carriages and now, we can’t live without our cars. 

Some of us would rather embrace our fears.  We will not let success keep us from failure, or in the case of developing technology, we will not let the opportunity to enjoy a bold new world keep us from wallowing in our self-imposed internment of ignorance.