Recently, a high school friend of mine posted on Facebook how her GPS had steered her through the back of beyond to get to a destination. And how fondly she remembered ‘map reading’. Indeed, I too remember spending many trips in the family car, navigating our way to Florida from Chicago
Unlike the GPS of today, with its choice of voices (I go for the British female … quel surprise!) and choice of animated cars (whatever resembles a Corvette … encore, quel surprise!), maps and atlases in my youth not only didn’t talk with accents but rarely told you any of the following:
1. What road to take when you move into ‘the fold’ on the page – a cartographers joke
2. Locations of restaurants, hotels, or gas stations – the last being particularly fun when Dad decided to play Russian Roulette with the gas gauge at Empty and drive past a station.
3. Local streets in large cities or towns – the ‘insert’ on the page might show, for example, Michigan Avenue Wacker Drive Chicago
4. Time and distance with any degree of accuracy – we knew the miles from Chicago to Naples
Now you could say ‘good riddance’. And there’s no doubt the web and all things mobile and digital have made life easier in some ways. But then it hits you: if you were born today, odds are you would probably grow up with no experience of not just map reading, but potentially many of the following:
- Books called Webster’s or Oxford English or Encyclopedia Britannica … indeed, printed books of any kind.
- Printed telephone directories like Yellow Pages and White Pages … or for that matter, fixed line telephones (POTS – Plain Old Telephone Services).
- Pen pals … or anything involving a pen/pencil, as opposed to a touch screen pad or motion sensor device
- Laptops and Desktops … iPad9 will be de rigor by the time I turned 7.
- The 6:00 national evening news, weekly news magazines, daily local newspapers, printed newsletters.
- Libraries and book stores
- Movies not streamed to your viewing device, but purchased on a thing called a DVD or seen in a cinema
- Signs that are only in English, and not also Spanish or Chinese
- Gasoline stations that sell gasoline instead of having electric plugs
- US Mail
What do you think will be a distant memory for those born today?
What do you HOPE will be a distant memory?
I do think the book will become a memory. We will all read on --say--the Nook, or what have you. I will miss having a cover, and I know they will still have them virtually. As someone who loved record Albums, I know they still have cd covers, but the size is not the same.
ReplyDeleteI have read many pieces about the sorrow people feel about not having the tactile feeling of reading a book. I initially felt sympathy for that viewpoint, and I do not currently (yet) own a reader, but the truth is this: I read and when it's good, I fall into the book like Alice into the rabbit hole. It's the word, it's not the medium.
Does that mean that book illustrators and book jacket designers will disappear? How sad - no future Quentin Blake's or Arthur Ransome's?...
ReplyDeleteand those single function devices such as wrist watches will no longer pass from father to son?
Never said that the change we'll probably witness was not without downsides - but wrist watches is another good one, where unless it maintains its fashion status will go the way of the telegraph, ticker tape machine, and mimeograph! However suspect a 1920's Jaeger watch will still have an inherent value to someone, just as stamps and coins will continue to have collectors.
ReplyDeleteThat the cash register will disappear is probably no surprise, but I expect it will be followed by cash as well. When your smartphone becomes the vehicle for transactions, what good is actual [physical] money? Anything that can be digitized (money, books, music) will abandon the traditional form we know it in. Anything that can't be (furniture, food, clothing) will remain.
ReplyDeleteInteresting point, Erik. Will cash become like the travelers check, only used when going to far flung destinations where technology lags behind?
ReplyDeletePost post note: we just drove back from FL, without the GPS. Apparently a tech glitch, wiped all maps and voices. Needed to send back to Garmin for repair/replace - something you never need to do with a map!
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