Day 18: Now & Then

I wonder sometimes how differently my life would be today if I had had a smartphone in my pocket at age 13 and could talk to whoever I wanted anytime I wanted. I wonder how differently I would have turned out if my parents let me play games on their iPhone as a preschooler or if in high school I would have had the choice of 10,000 movies to watch anytime I wanted or I could have dialed in virtually any song ever recorded. Would I have the same tastes I do now? Would I have talked to my friends more or less? Would I have more friends or less really good ones? Would I have learned too much too soon? Would my friends and family have learned too much about me? How would have I have felt about them having a separate digital presence? Would had having so many avenues in which to express my opinion made me less shy? Would I have only ended up echoing someone else’s opinion because I was too distracted to develop my own?

I wonder how life would have been different if I had had a digital camera at my fingertips to document the world and share what I saw so easily with others. I wonder what life would have looked like to have had a blog or Web site at my disposal to spread my teenage-aged whims globally. Would I communicate or write differently today? Would I have discovered my beliefs and fears and aspirations and strengths and weaknesses in the same way? I wonder what it would have been like playing games online with perfect strangers. I wonder if watching and reading about sports would have mattered as much or would I have spent more time exploring other interests that weren’t available to me back then? I wonder if I would have grown up too soon.

That last point is the one I spend a considerable amount of time contemplating where my kids and their friends and others in general are concerned. Did my kids grow up or are they growing up too quickly due to technology constantly inundating them with ideas, images, and more that were beyond my scope at a similar age? I’m not sure.

I’m not someone who bemoans all the ways technology is ruining society, cheapening culture, inflating egos, and destroying interpersonal communication. All of those things are probably true to some extent, but for every negative stemming from technology, I believe I can point out 10 positives technology enables. Beyond that, life simply changes. My time as a youth isn’t supposed to be the same as my kids’ time. Mine wasn’t the same as my parents’, and theirs’ not the same as their parents’. My kids know of no other life than one that puts technology right at the core. So, while I despised the influence that something like MySpace and its “look at me being so risqué” culture had on my older kids and accelerated the rate at which they grew up, I’m filled with gratitude for things like the vast amount of diverse and eclectic people my kids have encountered and interact with daily thanks to technology.