It will never cease to amaze me how quickly new technologies are invented, seized upon and then damn-near forgotten. Nowhere is this trend more clear than in the field of consumer electronics, where it’s hard for many — including tech nerds like me — to even keep up.
In fact, I’m not even sure I qualify as a tech nerd anymore. I used to be. I was tinkering with computers from my late teens well through into my 20s. But there came a time when I just didn’t have enough free hours in the day to stay current. Family and work pressures were eating up too much of my time. I lamented the growing obsolescence of my computer knowledge and skills to a friend, someone who works full-time in IT. He consoled me with words I’ve never forgotten (quoting best I can from memory): “Don’t worry about it. The damn things are so complicated now that there isn’t a single person on this Earth who could design and build a computer from scratch. You’d need a team of experts in a variety of fields. No one person can know it all.”
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It was a fascinating insight, and one that’s only gotten truer in the years since that remark. Like many Canadians, I buy my cellphones on two-year contracts. This is just to keep costs down, but it also gives us a useful window into the rate of technological change. Every two years, we can replace a device with something appreciably more powerful than what was current only 104 weeks earlier. For many of us, we’re probably deep into the onset of diminishing returns. If your needs are modest — let’s say phone calls, text messaging, basic email connectivity, maybe a camera — we’re well past the kind of smartphone technology needed to meet them. But if you’re more interested in the cutting-edge tools, your biennial upgrade is a window into rapid progress.
I was thinking of this the other day. My eldest child is six, and she’s been using touch-screen devices since … well, since she was too young. (Youth screen-time warnings were not entirely heeded in this household.) A touch screen is second-nature to her. Picking up a phone or iPad, unlocking it with a simple alphanumeric password and then using her app of choice is something she mastered long ago. Her brother, only four, is basically as fluent.
But recently, having heard about a fun computer game from a classmate — note the emphasis, this is an actual PC game, not something to be played on a phone — she wanted to try it out. So I sat her down, and discovered that something as simple as a computer mouse peripheral was utterly confounding to her and her younger brother.
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The mouse, of course, is not a particularly new technology. I’m old enough, barely, to remember “learning computers” in elementary school (not much was learned) using ancient devices with trackballs embedded in the keyboard. That itself was considered a huge improvement over previous user controls. Mouses came along and blew trackballs out of the water eventually, of course, and themselves underwent a big consumer-friendly advancement when light tracking replaced the damned lint-collecting little ball that used to be the heart of the mouse. Indeed, looking at the mouse I’m using as I write this column, a tiny, ergonomic and wireless little device, it bears little resemblance to the ones I used growing up.
Still, I confess to a pang of — shame? is that the right word? — when I realized my six-year-old literally had no idea how to use one. It’s a technology completely outside of her experience. Having grown up in a world of smartphones and tablets, she’d never used one.
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Kids adapt quickly, of course. All I had to do was think of something that would motivate her to use a computer, including the mouse and keyboard, and that was easy enough. (Thank you, Plants vs. Zombies and Minecraft.) This follows something of a time-honoured tradition in the family. I also really only learned computers, on a clunky (even then) 386, because I wanted to play games. What worked on me will probably work on her. Her desire to kill zombies and dig up treasure will cause her to figure out how to type and use a mouse without even realizing she’s learning valuable skills she’ll be using for the rest of her life.
Unless, of course, she doesn’t use them at all.
After I got her the games on the weekend, and patted myself on the back for my brilliance in finding a way to trick her into quickly mastering new skills, it occurred to me that I might simply be behind the curve. Teaching her to use a mouse might be as if my dad went the extra mile to teach me about replacing typewriter ribbons or his old man drilling Morse code into him. It is entirely possible that I am teaching her an already obsolete technology. Will the mouse survive long in a touchscreen-friendly world? Will we need keyboards much longer? It’s hard for me to imagine doing without them. But then again, this entire paragraph that you are reading now was dictated into my phone, grammar and all, without requiring a single stroke of a key from me. That would not have been realistically possible even a few years ago. I spoke. These words appeared.
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A mouse is a strange thing to get nostalgic about. I’m not sure this is even nostalgia, per se. It’s probably better just described as an awareness of how fleeting so much of our technology is. For most of my grandfather’s life, a telephone and a radio were his primary (almost sole) means of communication with the broader world. How many marvels will my kids use as a matter of routine, to be learned, mastered and forgotten in the blink of a historical eye? How long will any adult working with computers today be able to keep up with the pace of change?
Matt Gurney is host of The Exchange with Matt Gurney on Global News Radio 640 Toronto and a columnist for Global News.
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