Learn Tech or Be Left Behind

I would be amiss if I didn’t start out this blog with a shout out to my alma mater Michigan State University who just won the Big 10 Championship in football. Go State! With that said, I will get back to business. The other night I noticed something as I sat down in my chair. My wife was doing something on her smart phone. My one daughter was on her tablet and my other daughter was listening to her iPod. We are a technology based society these days. I actually have free reign on the desktop computer because no one else in the family really uses it except me. This is not a blog about technology being evil or great. It is an affirmation that it has become a cornerstone in our lives. I make no secret of the fact that I basically learned to write by telling stories with my family after dinner as a child. Sometimes we played cards as we talked but we always had a pot of tea. It sounds boring and downright painful to my children but that was our family time. We had television and that was about it. If there was a show you wanted to see, you better remember to watch it and hope no one else was using the T.V. because there was no DVR to save it for you. So we talked and told stories and played games. It seems like those days have gone by. I look at the Christmas lists I have been given and they are increasingly tech related. In college I was on the cutting edge of technology. Now I am a dinosaur needing my children to help me figure out my smartphone. When my daughters do their homework and can’t find the answers they look on the internet. I used to look things up in a set of encyclopedias we owned. It makes me wonder which way is better. Having the internet puts information at your fingertips and allows you to find the answers quickly. That’s certainly a plus. It is efficient and effective. Looking things up in books took more time and was often painstaking. Then again, maybe I learned more? Perhaps searching for the answers taught me organizational skills and the value of hard work. With all that being said, if I were in school and needed help on a paper I would definitely make use of the internet. Everything is right there. I think that is the point of this blog. You can love technology. You can hate technology. But one way or another, it is here to stay. When companies fail to change with the times, they go out of business. (See Blockbuster) We as individuals can’t afford to be left behind in today’s technical world. But sometimes I really do miss those talks over a pot of tea.