It’s no mystery that the state of technology is advancing at an astounding rate. The gaming desktop that I had purchased two years ago used to play any title on ultra/1920:1080/60fps flawlessly, but now I experience a fair deal of struggling on high settings. It’s a double-edged sword really; witnessing technological feats can be truly astounding, especially when you’re in physical possession of the newest whatever, but not so much when you realize your current possessions are aging as the common housefly does.
For the most part, technology doesn’t retain its value either – the IPhone 3GS goes for $24.50 on eBay right now. There are no vintage laptops or televisions, like there are cars (though technically, shouldn’t cars be the same way? I guess culture and aesthetic nature is more applicable to the automotive industry, but I won’t delve into a field that is mostly beyond my knowledge). Bringing further video game talk into this, technology gets old in the same way that Madden does; all griping aside, no one voluntarily says, “oh hey, let’s pop in Madden 2001 and chillax,” unless it’s the only game in your entire house.
There are a few different types of responders to this rapid advancement: first, there are the people who simply don’t care. They’re content with their flip phones because they can talk to their friends in a different state, and tube TVs present color just fine. There are the helpless buyers, who need to have EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of Apple’s products the week it hits the shelves. There are people like me, who believe they are a one man PC magazine, spending unnecessary amounts of time looking at the specs and reviews for 
every single laptop ever, even though they’re only buying one (I went with the MacBook pro, because of battery life and size). There are the wiser ones who buy the occasional nice thing ever 2-3 years or so, not over-indulging themselves. Then there are the people who are lost in the ages – the people who wouldn’t recognize the power button, even if it constantly yelled profanity in their faces. My mom falls under that category.
I love the woman to death, but her inquiries tend to be nothing short of amazing many-a-time. I can understand technological troubles if previous contact with technology was scarce, but there’s something crazy about my mom’s case. One day we were talking in the car, and I asked her what she majored in throughout college. The exact words that came out of her mouth sounded as so: “IT and computer language.” It was almost like reality as a whole, started to warp in on itself and distort everybody that I knew. It was the perfect case of denial for the next month or so.
From that moment forward, whenever my mom had a technological issue, I would respond with “you can do it, I believe in you. After all, you are an IT major.” It was fairly mean but comically fulfilling. Her response was always that technology wasn’t like how it used to be, even for the simplest problems. There would be times where she would ask if I could power on the computer for her, and after I asked how she didn’t know how to do that, she would respond with “computers aren’t how they used to be.” I mean hey, the power button is preeeeetty revolutionary. My personal favorite was when she needed me to go to a website for her (disclaimer: this was before windows 8 existed; I’d have understood if she had trouble operating that), because she couldn’t access the Internet. I laughed, and her rebuttal was, of course, that “computers are so complicated now.”
There is good news, in that my Dad and I are slowly re-integrating her into the 21st century. She’s been using her first mp3 player for a while now, and we’re considering the idea of a smartphone, but that might prove to be too great a hurtle to jump. Nevertheless, she’s the greatest and I’ll always help her with any tech issues, no matter how basic.
Ian Barbour