September 27, 2019

… does that make me old? I think not.

I can unequivocally state that my parents’ generation enjoyed the BEST times of Pakistan – no two ways about it.  However, my generation of the 1960s have evolved through one of the most INTERESTING and EXCITING periods of history – the TECHNOLOGY explosion.  I mean, we have first-hand witnessed –

1. The change from rotary to touch button telephones;
2. Analog to Digital services telephone services;
3. The advent of the PERSONAL computer (my first computer was an IBM machine) in the early 1980s;
4. Mobile phones – GSM, 3G, 4G, 5G … and all the future “G’s” that are to come;
5. Laptops, sat phones, VOIP tech, skype, whats app, wechat, tablets;
6. Newspapers to online news and RSS feeds;
7. Print media to Social media;
8. Reel cameras to Digital cameras- in fact, I found one such camera and asked my studio for a 36mm reel only to be told they’ve been discontinued 😊!  So, I’ve started scanning my old reels into digital photos for posterity;
9. Vinyl records, cassette tapes, VHS & Beta to cloud based music & videos;
10. Pen cameras, car cameras, CCTV – you name it … it’s out of the old “BOND” movies we used to see!
11. We used pens & pencils but the latest tablet & phone technology uses a stylus and speech-to-written technology. 
12. Amazon, Careem, Uber … the list goes on an on.

The generation of the ‘90s has grown up on digital … they never experienced non-digital communication!  It’s online movies, Netflix, cloud-based streaming movies, etc.  Yes, my kids come to the theatre but they don’t need a cable TV set up in their dorms anymore- they are quite content with seeing their content on their laptops.

However, I feel, what technology explosion we saw in the ‘90s was one of the most interesting a generation can witness – notwithstanding what is yet to come! –  and things are still evolving.

It’s only a matter of time when our thoughts will be transcribed to the written-word … I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s already here !