a rumination while biking - how tech has changed in my few decades on this planet - remember typewriters?

While biking home from the coffee shop today, for some reason, it crossed my mind that information technology and access to info has evolved immensely in my few decades of existence - for me personally, as a regular citizen (albeit 1st world citizen) and as a tech worker.

 

While pedaling along, I continued to ponder how I had started out as a kid, pounding out silly stories on a manual typewriter. My uncle collected and repaired manual typewriters since he was a teenager (if you don't know what a typewriter is, you have the luxury of googling it, right here and now).

 

As a youngster, I found it frustrating how hard it was to find stuff at the library.

 

Yea, we had to drive (or otherwise commute) to a place that housed information in the form of books, journals, and other printed materials. And there was microfiche - semi high-tech, but a pain in the arse to track down via index cards (google that one too, if needed), load up the reels, then scroll through dizzying, headache-inducing black-n-white film. Index cards! The search engine indexes of in times of yore.

 

One of the prevalent points from this unexpected rumination was "damn, it was ridiculously hard to find information, track it down, or simply browse through stuff randomly".  Again, unless you owned a library, you had to first get to one. Then scour through index cards and pencil down Dewey numbers. Then walk to find books placed on shelves. Incredible luck if books were where they were supposed to be -- or weren't out in circulation indefinitely. Or didn't have half the pages torn out.

 

And you had to be driven and patient to actually bother doing all this.

 

The other point that rang in mind, before I switched mental gears back to focusing on the bike ride was this: today I often feel overwhelmed with the ease and degree of access to information.  It's blindly fast and accessible from wherever and whenever I want it - from a laptop, tablet, from a phone while in bed. Anything I can think of, or whatever randomly pops up on my screen can be chased down through endless halls via taps and clicks.

 

Text, wikis, videos, music, documents. Let alone IM, Skype, FB, emails, and other social interactive channels.

 

I don't even have to stand up and drive to a library. Unfathomable amounts of info are readily available from the phone that never leaves my side.

 

So, today, in contrast to the days of manual typewriters and limited access, the challenge is managing my time and learning how not to get sucked into the blackholes of information and online timewaster traps. 

 

It blows my mind how the information revolution -- even in my short years -- has shifted the problem from too-little accessible information to so much info you have to fight from drowning in it!