Selah playing the radio
This is a picture from when Selah was only a few months old. At the time, one of her favorite toys was her radio. It’s shaped to look like a little boom box and plays a variety of children’s tunes. What’s interesting to me is that when you turn the dial it actually plays static and the sound of skipping over radio stations. As I watched my little girl play with this, I realized she will likely never know what radio static is or what it’s like to turn a dial to get a radio station. Who knows, she may not even know what a radio station is in the traditional sense.
It go me thinking about all the things she’ll also never know about, things that I grew up playing with or that were a part of my life.
The biggest thing…VHS tapes. It was a big deal that we had a VCR with a remote when I was a kid, but our remote had a cord on it and you loaded the cassette in from the top. It was a big deal at the time. Even now, we have DVDs and I’m sure those are going to seem as ancient to my girl when she is old enough to know better as VHS appear to me now.
Computers are constantly changing and I wonder just what my daughter will be able to do with technology. Will the world look more like the Jetsons?
Will my daughter make fun of me for going to movies in 2D? Will the high-technology 3D movies we see today be ‘oldies’ to her generation?
More importantly, will I be able to keep up with it all? I think I’m doing a pretty good job riding the technology wave. Accepting whatever comes next, reading up on trends…but one day will I be that weird old guy who is trying to be hip by having the latest gadgets? You know who I’m talking about. They are usually really old guys who bought Beta when they first came out because they were a big deal, but now they can’t even spell ‘internet.’ Yet, this same person who was clearly once into tech, has spent years avoiding it…and now has a smartphone. Not that every old person with an iPhone is like this, but there are some who are just way too excited to be on the “world wide web” connecting to the “internets.” I don’t want to be that guy.
Who do I want to be? I want to be that guy who’s not scared by the tech, but not necessarily driven to always have the latest stuff when it comes out. I’d like to always be like I am now. Someone told me that can’t happen…and that eventually I’ll get old. I’m not sure I believe them…but then again that stranger in the mirror laughs at me when I tell him I am the same guy I was in college. What does that old man know anyway.
