I pass that park any time I take that route to work [almost everyday I’m on this particular on-site job] or home from work [less of the time, but still often.]
Granted, the playground is more visible on the return home trip than the morning commute in to work. I usually only take that route home in certain weather conditions or if I need to run an errand on the side of the town the park is in.
On one such occasion, within the last few weeks, I noticed that among the play equipment is some sort of activity made out of a series of hanging tires.
Which got me thinking to my childhood days, and summer days of swimming at a freshwater beach that was a family favorite: including what today we would call “pool toys” like inflatable rafts.
And inner tubes.
Real, honest-to-goodness inner tubes, from real honest-to-goodness automobile tires no longer suitable for over-the-road use.
And that got me thinking about the amazing, but taken-for-granted technology of things like cell phones.
I worked for an interval for Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, which pioneered the global positioning system on which all satellite technology of today [and thus much cell phone technology of today] is based.
But . . . I actually remember my family having an actual, real-life party-line telephone.
For you folks too young to know about those things: a party line telephone was a situation in which two [or more] households in close living proximity who could not afford a dedicated telephone line individually shared a telephone account.
Those people who still have landline phones in their homes today have what is called a “private line” in contrast to the old “party line.” [Although party lines are still available, per my phone book: but I know of no one who still has one.] Because my parents income in relation to expenses improved, and also because the family we shared the line with were . . . difficult . . . to deal with in such a circumstances, my parents finally got a private line when I was about ten years old.
Today, youth take for granted not just a regular landline phone in their house, but calling anyone from anywhere on a cell phone.
Those ruminations got me thinking on something a friend who worked as an adjunct college instructor in Media Arts once told me.
That when she showed an old western movie in class, the class asked “what’s wrong with it?”
Well, ah, that’s the way it was made, because that was the technology of the time. Black-and-white filming.
And when color filming became POSSIBLE, it was at first too expensive: at least for a full-scale production.
One of the first partially color films was “The Wizard of Oz.” This storyline lent itself to using color for most of the story, with black-and-white prologue and epilogue sequences.
Just those few black-and-white sequences saved a great deal in terms of cost.
Though it may not be the first, the first television show I remember that had a black-and-white to color switcheroo in midstream was “Bewitched.” The first few years were black-and-white, then it switched to “technicolor” when the technology became affordable.
Again, as I recall, they tied the switch into the storyline: I think, if memory serves, Samantha’s announcement of her pregnancy with Tabitha.
I grew up on black-and-white television shows, and although I’ve not watched much television lately, overall, my impression is that much of that earlier material was better quality than what we see today: because we had to “make do” with imagination rather than relying on technology.
Today, people under the age of 50 or so, take these advances for granted.
Which is a shame. Just look at the history of humanity: we have made, technologically, more advances in the past about 200 years than we did in millennia before that.
Two hundred years ago, families had no central heating nor interior plumbing, let alone electricity or internal combustion engines.
A thousand years ago, anything you MIGHT read would have been laboriously hand-copied. Typewriters and the Gutenberg press were well in the future.
And, I’m sure, many of my readers in the age of all-season-radial tires have no clue what an “inner tube” tire is.
Ah, it was a shell much like the modern tire; but lesser evolved in technology and more subject to problems like punctures.
Inside the shell we had an “inner tube.”
In the technology of the time, that was a double layer of protection from damage.
That we have advanced from that to where we are today, in less than one hundred years, is not a technological achievement anyone should “take for granted.”
And . . . the rapidity of technological advancement poses moral and ethical issues, also; which [society wide] haven’t kept pace.
But THAT is a post for another time.
What makes me rather sad, in terms of this particular post, is that “we” as a society fail to recognize that amazing fact: in the past two hundred to three hundred years, we have made more technological progress that we had in more than three thousand years prior to the year 1800 [just as a nice round number choice of date.]
I believe that that puts us at risk as a society. As I have heard said: “History repeats herself because no one listened the first time.”
And I think we are going to find that we are on a self-destruct pattern by not recognizing “history” in terms of ethical considerations of our rapid technological advancement.
And . . . I have also heard that a lack of concern is a far greater enemy than active opposition to a position.
So, we need to cultivate a historical perspective among our youth.
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