I write this on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. This milestone, for me, is something of a technological confluence of things I've been pondering much of this week. The other day I was "remoting" (some say "telecommuting") from home, dialed-in to the office via a VPN (virtual private network) connection, working from my laptop which had a direct link to our company's servers. In another part of the house my own desktop PC was also purring so I could check in on CNN.com and other online interests during breaks. Earlier that morning I attended a teleconference via my cell phone with a room full of people at the main office, and still other telecommuters who had also dialed-in simultaneously. Then later in the day I watched (on my home desktop PC, in real-time) space shuttle "Endeavour" blast off to rendezvous with the International Space Station. Later that evening I read about the upcoming anniversary of Apollo 11 and it was about then that it struck me.How matter-of-factly we've come to take the every-day gadgets of the new century, things that we use routinely without wonder, but inventions that we marvel at just the same. I am both enamoured and saddened at the same time. There's something about the forward march of progress that demands that something of the past, however cherished and prized, must die, must go the way of the dinosaur to make room for the future. When I was little I had a next-door neighbor friend named Danny. Late at night, Danny and I talked (or tried to talk) from each other's bedroom windows using two tin cans joined together with a long stretch of kite string. I can still remember the glee of yelling into the can, imagining that the taunt string was transmitting my words to Danny with perfect resonance and clarity. Danny, in turn, would yell back at me across our backyards. In theory it seemed sound enough to us: After all, didn't a couple of guys named Morse and Bell once do something similar with vibrating wires?
Of course we never did hear each other's voices...except that we were literally just next door from each other and could hear our own yelling easily enough. Still, the wonder of that simple device, the sheer uncomplicated fun of the thing, and the magical way it fueled our imaginations to believe that we could really devise a means to talk to each other with nothing more than a couple of tin cans and some string is a memory I still cherish. It said something about the inherent human need to believe, to have faith in some things, without the need for questions. No doubts ever clouded our vision back then. Perchance to dream? But of course.
Today we live in a world of eighth wonders that abound more and more each day, and are upgraded and enhanced with such rapidity that we are all running in place just to keep up. (No sooner does one buy a cell phone than it's outdated in a few months.) These things have become so woven into the fabric of our society that I can't imagine how any of us managed to live without today's techno conveniences. Still, a part of me misses those tin can days. Things were simpler and less complicated then. In the '50s the transistor radio was a big deal. Frigidaires and black 'n' white TVs with rabbit ears were big deals, too. These things were wonderfully uncomplicated for the most part, and they walked -- rather than rushed -- upon us in such a way that we absorbed them easily and readily into our culture.
But all of that changed on July 20, 1969. We, as a people, as a planet, were forever changed. A Man from planet Earth walked on the moon, left his footprints in the lunar dust, and said we had all just taken a giant leap forward. Now, as the new century and its techo wonders rush upon us, we absorb them into our lives as best we can. They do not walk, these things, but are shoved down our throats, and our lives are no longer simple but hurried along as fast as the Saturn V rocket that pushed Apollo 11 out of Earth's atmosphere and into the history books.
Ironically, I wouldn't even have a job right now if it weren't for the advent of today's technology. I wouldn't be building this blog were it not for my PC. But every now and then I think about my childhood days with my neighbor friend Danny, and I think that I would gladly chuck my cell phone and my other high-tech gadgets in the trash bin just for the chance to yell into those tin cans just one more time...and believe.
