It’s a Wonderful World!

Well, sometimes it seems like it anyway.

Today we had to drive to the store and my wife wanted to listen to a particular radio station that I knew would fade out on our way into the city (it’s a particularly low wattage station), so I showed her how to listen to it with a phone app. She was pretty amazed (she’s a low tech person). And we had crystal clear, digital reception, anywhere we drove. Simply amazing!

This incident reminded me of how far we’ve come with technology since I was a young boy living in rural New York State. I remember listening to New York Yankees baseball and Buffalo Sabre’s ice hockey on my transistor radio. I had all the stations memorized, like WBZ in Boston and KYW in Philadelphia. I could pick up all those far away stations at night – some nights better than others. I would spin the tuner of my small radio, and I could tell the difference between sports and music radio through all the static. I could find the games pretty quickly – it was quite a skill. It was exciting for me, and a challenge, to see what stations I could find.

I don’t even think I own a transistor radio now (but you never know what you’ll find if you dig into the right box). I do own a couple weather radios, like you might use in a storm to get weather info, but other than that, I depend upon the internet for most of the information I consume.

It’s actually a bit scary, when I think about it. We rely on the internet for most all information. TV, radio, news, music, everything we buy comes via the internet. If the internet were gone one day, what would we do? If a couple generations pass with such dependence on the internet, there will be nobody left on earth that knows how to do anything without it. I’ll be OK, and my son will be OK. But his children’s children will never know how to do anything without it. And by that time the artificial intelligence will be making decisions for us – reminding us to do what we need to do, when we need to do it (or when someone else wants us to do it).

So, this was my cheerful thought of the day. I hope you enjoy – and maybe just thinking about it will help me go offline now and again, so I don’t forget how to live without the internet! I’ve got my film cameras, and my weather radio – so I’m ready!