The question for today is “Just how long will it take a man who qualifies for the senior discount at the movies to learn how to establish a ‘Facebook’ presence?” A partial answer is, “A lot longer than he first thought it would.” I got one of those books that they write for dummies but it turns out I’m dumber that the authors thought possible. I find that I’m stopping every five minutes to look up the meaning of a term that is used to simplify the process.
There’s information on topics I never thought I’d have to know about, like posting videos to your albums. I always thought I was pretty smart to remember to wait the required sixty seconds before peeling off the paper on a Polaroid picture. I wonder how many folks reading this remember that at one time the idea of having a picture that you could hand out right after you took it was considered the technological innovation of the decade.
I can still remember trying to explain to my kids, that when I was young television was in black-and-white. They couldn’t understand why someone would want to turn off the color. In fact todays TVs don’t even have that feature. Now the question is “Why wouldn’t you have the high definition service, or maybe 3D?” Sometimes I feel as if the reason newspapers are failing is because today’s reader doesn’t want to have the pictures in black and white.
“Old-fashion” is translated by today’s reader as “Not as Good.” Discussions about the Good-old-days means not a personal historical reference but rather a boring talk about how bad things were and why we don’t want them back again. It’s not that the younger generation has the wrong attitude. In fact those who are just starting to face life’s challenges have always looked for change to make their travails easier. Certainly no one wants to back to the days when the only way to dry your just-washed clothes was to hang them outside on a string. Today we have dryers which can do the job in no time at all. If you miss the smell of the clothes that were hung outside in the fresh air, you can throw in one of those wax impregnated sheets that will do the same thing, without having to actually go outside.
Of course I shouldn’t be complaining. After all, the books that I write are available electronically. You can just page over to the Kindle store and download any one of the beauties that are highlighted to the right. You don’t have to drive over to a brick-and-mortar building, look through the shelves, and then carry it over to the desk and exchange real money for the prize you want to read.
I’m even so old that I can remember actually walking over to the store. Yes that’s right getting up and moving your legs to accomplish the same thing as driving your car. In the relatively short span of my life, we’ve moved from asking for a ride to the store to buy a book, to turning on your computer and ordering the download of the book with your computer. Wow, I really am old. I’ve forgotten that today we don’t turn on the computer, we use our smart phone to download books, and then transfer the file to our tablet computers so that we don’t have to squint at the smaller screen.
