Ahh… My favorite time of the year: the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament - March Madness. This Thursday night and Friday night I will likely stay up late watching the cinderella upsets and last minute shots. One of the time-honored traditions during March Madness is filling out the brackets for the tournament before the games start. Now I have been a basketball fan for my whole life, and for some reason have always been really bad at picking these games. In high school a girl picked the teams based on her favorite colors and won our “pool.” Needless to say, we made the rule "no girls" the next year. Last year I came in dead last in our staff's bracket challenge. But for some reason every year I still fill out the bracket and expect to pick all the right 12-5 upsets.
Tonight I filled out a few of my brackets and I realized how much easier it is now than the manual way we used to do it. I remember (in my day) buying a newspaper to cut out the bracket and then making copies of it for my friends. I almost forgot how we did that before the internet. That got me thinking about how technology has changed our view of normal.
How did we get maps to events? How did we find phone numbers? How did we check sports scores? How did we write our musings so everyone could read them? How did we know who was calling us when the phone rang? How did we alert everyone that we were moving to another city or that we had a baby? What did we do before cell phones? Now if I leave the house to run one errand without my cell phone – I think I am really living on the edge. Do you remember calling someone’s house and just letting it ring? If they weren’t there you weren’t frustrated; you just called later. And if you did that now, people would think you were stalking them with 7 missed calls from you and no message. Weird uh? The only reason that you didn’t answer the phone was if you were grounded from it. Now we give the “look off” when we look and decide if we have enough time to answer that call…. I mean some people do that – not me!!!. So I was wondering what else is obsolete now. What else seemed normal before technology and now would be weird? And do you think that technology has made us more connected or less connected? Thoughts?
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4 comments:
How did we leave comments on blogs? That's all I've got right now.
A set of encyclopedias. My family didn't have a set, so I went to the library to do my research. Who doesn't love wiki, now?!
In terms of making us more or less connected, I could argue either point. For now I will say more connected. I just reconnected with someone from the 5th grade via the phone first (not MySpace which I refuse to use but probably connects people more easily) and now my friend and I email regularly. I probably wouldn't feel comfortable calling this person up every few weeks or months, but emailing really works for us. Therefore, I go with more connected.
i heard someone say yesterday, "i was reading my friend's blog today, and..." i thought, wow that statement would've made no sense 5 years ago. my friend's what?
Thanks for writing this.
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