Welcome to my Analog Age

If I may be allowed to coin my own term, I’ve long considered myself an “anachronist”.  That is, my tastes, likes, and dislikes would seem to indicate that I belong in a different time.   When my friends were blasting The Who, The Boss and The Clash, I was grooving to Brahms Symphonies and late Beethoven String Quartets.  As microwave ovens and food processors became mainstream, I was learning to put up jam and bake bread from scratch.   I was more surprised than anyone when my career in healthcare led to an executive position in a software company, where I became an interpreter of new information technologies for hospitals in the post-apocalyptic DRG age.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy new technology; I have a household full of laptops, ipods, iphones, and very big, very flat TVs.  But I wonder about the current generation of kids whose lives have begun with such advanced toys that they have missed the opportunity to understand what these “advancements” represent.   I used to watch a great public television show called Connections.  Illustrating “connections” between, for example, the spice markets of Istanbul and the modern laser, host/writer James Burke suggests that technological enhancements occur based on today’s experience and not with knowledge of where an innovation will lead.  Progress, then, is a confluence of ideas and opportunities pushing forward.  But in considering today’s crazy world, I fear that cycle time has become so quickened that we’ve short-sheeted the observational experiences of our youngsters.   Will enough among them be able to recognize significance?  Are our sea changes even perceptible to them?  

My husband and I, nerds that we are, sometimes spend a romantic evening trying to name the quantum leaps that have occurred in our own lifetimes.  We remember with fondness and a chuckle or two things like getting up to change the channel, and rotary dial phones.  (There is a hilarious scene in the film In and Out where Matt Dillon’s clueless super model girlfriend tries to push the holes in a small-town rotary phone.)   We have become collectors of such senseless old school things as fountain pens and manual typewriters—even an Edison grammaphone—because we are fascinated by their mechanical beauty.  In the digital world, you can’t see how things work.  What do you learn when “your body is the controller”?

Years ago I started my own rebellion against living unenlightened in the digital age: I bought my children analog watches.  They were the only three year olds with colorful Swatches strapped to their wrists.  I didn’t know when they would learn to tell time, but I was determined that they would understand how “time passes”.  Time is not a number on a display.   It is a slice of our lifetime that teaches patience, productivity, and planning.  It is something you spend and never get back.  It is something of value that if spent hastily in youth will be repented in old age.  

Over the years my kids got lots of watches, but always analog watches.  Even as my son graduated from high school and received his first significant “timepiece” it was not only analog and self-winding but also a reminder of this lesson from his youth.   I don’t know if it has mattered at all, but I believe, unlike their friends, my kids are very "timely".  They understand when to begin showering or dressing in order to be somewhere at a certain time.  They are typically the ones standing around and waiting for others to show up. 

I am getting ready for my next battle frontier:  GPS systems.    Long before my kids got behind the wheel of a car we were discussing north and south, forcing them to give directions to our next destination, observing landmarks, and learning to visualize and read maps.   Now, we can put a handy gadget in our kids’ cars so they can find their way home, but as a result they follow prompts habitually and do not process their surroundings.    Many kids today cannot navigate on written or verbal directions.  They do not have a clear mental model of where their home is situated in relation to other major places they frequent.  A GPS is very useful, but what if it fails (or, as is frequently the case, is wrong)?    I fear for a generation of kids that are so plugged in, they are really and truly lost.

Coming tomorrow:  The Chocolate Covered Piano Lesson