as much as i love technology, certain things freak me out – in particular when i stop to think about the amazing technological world that the current generation is growing up in. i don’t know why i find it so unsettling, but i do – i get a distinct sense of unease, as if the world is turning too fast and is in danger of spinning out of control. it’s ludicrous, i know, but the pace of change even in my lifetime, seems to be increasing exponentially with every new development. i worry that as i struggle to keep up, i’ll have less and less in common with those coming behind me – which is of course true of everyone as they age, but the lightspeed acceleration of that ever-widening gap leaves me with a sense of whiplash. as someone who has always embraced the new advances in technology, this feeling is new to me, and i find myself wanting to slow things down. already, at the advanced age of 37, i am bemoaning the loss of simpler times, even knowing as i do, that it will only get worse.

i grew up with black bakelite rotary phones, yet my nieces and nephews will never know a world where everyone doesn’t have a smartphone that isn’t also a camera, web browser, and gps device. seeing toddlers clamour to play with touchscreens just blows my mind.

the only people that will ever see the pictures of me running around with a pot on my head at the age of 3, are people who come to my house and view them in an actual photo album, and there are, luckily, no surviving photos that document my experimentation with green hair. by the time my nieces and nephews hit their teenage years, however, there will be thousands and thousands of photos of them floating around in existence in a multitude of places on the web – their entire lives, the embarrassing and the mundane, will be digitally documented, and those images will likely continue on in perpetuity.

i had to learn to recite my address in case i got lost – yet today we’re a hairsbreadth away from everyone being microchipped. i went to a library and selected paper books to read – these days many people rarely read anything longer than an email on a computer screen. i had to save my allowance and go to a shop to purchase the latest record, but now, any music or movie you want is only a few minutes’ download away for instant gratification. those friends i made at sleepaway camp, i had to write to, using pen and paper and stamps, yet skype and facebook have obliterated any need for something as quaint as a letter.

all of this makes me sound like a luddite, which i’m absolutely not, as anyone who knows me in person will testify. but i can’t help feeling nostalgic – so many of what were formative experiences for me growing up, have fallen by the wayside as nothing more than archaic relics of an analogue age… and i’m only 37. what else from my childhood will become permanently outmoded?

what it feels like is this: the faster those things which were so important to shaping me become outdated, the faster *i* become outdated.

and yet, i know such change is inevitable, and mostly good. as our technology becomes more sophisticated, so do we – i really believe that to be true, (even when it doesn’t often seem so). my nieces and nephews will experience a world which was well beyond my reach as a kid. i am a product of a time when things were constrained to the tangible, physical realm – this generation will have no such constraints. the possibilities, for them, are nearly infinite.

my generation, generation x, once the vaunted vanguard of the new and experimental, will go the way of the dodo – i am convinced of that. and i believe that where it once took a lifetime to become outpaced by the invention of the telephone, or television, or internet, whatever comes next that demarcates that generational chasm between new and old, will happen much faster than it ever did before. and it’s that knowledge that makes me so uncomfortable – i, who once considered myself something of an early adopter, am now lagging behind. when my parents were this age, everything new was aimed at them – today, everything new is starting to be aimed at the babies from the turn of the millennium.

i am technologically old, or getting there. and in a few years time, i’ll still be clutching my iphone 4 and remembering the days of video downloads, when everyone else has moved onto holographic communication devices and projection media streaming. soon i’ll be nothing more than a creaky dinosaur, a living, breathing fossil. me and my photos of running around with a pot on my head, and blessedly not photos of me running around with green hair. and thank god for that.

trading things in – the voluntary butler scheme

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