Do You See What I See?

I heard that famous Christmas carol in a Chinese restaurant the other day. At the same time I saw a kid across aisle from me busily pecking away at his cell phone. Was he sending a text message to a friend or was he playing a game? I had no way of knowing. But it got me thinking. What does that kid think of me over here hacking away on my laptop? What I do know is that even though we were looking at the same things - a computer and a cell phone - we were seeing different things. I saw a cool and powerful computer in front of me and a kid playing with an overly complex data device. I bet the kid was wondering about the old guy using the clunky old computer (and telling all his friends about it via IM).

It seems that age really does temper our view of technology. For me, texting is a novelty that I've never mastered. Pushing the "7" button on my phone four times to enter the letter "S" is just counter-intuitive. Yeah, I know there are programs that guess what I'm trying to enter and I can select from a list of words. Now I'm trying to read and type at the same time. Nope, not going to happen. I went out and got a phone that has a tiny keypad on it so I can text like everyone else. Now I just have to learn to read what people are sending me.

I think about the discussions I had with my Dad back in the '90s. Desktop computers were starting to show up in his office and he wasn't happy about it. He told me he didn't know a thing about programming and wasn't planning to learn. My assurances that he wouldn't have to program a thing fell on deaf ears. He ended up retiring early just so he wouldn't have to make the change.

A couple of years later my Mom bought a "home computer" and this really irked my father. Today we'd laugh at the 64MB of RAM and archaic processor. But back then it was pretty cool. My brother and I started creating programs in BASIC and my mother started printing out the Help files. Mom became a big fan of email. My wife and I always laughed when Mom would call and ask us if we'd gotten the email she sent ten minutes before.

Flash forward to the present day. My cell phone has more horsepower than my Mom's PC. Now I'm calling my employees wondering why they haven't responded to an email I sent a half hour ago. They get back at me by sending text messages to my phone. Folks half my age are laughing at me when they see my feeble attempts to decipher and respond to these text messages.

What's in store for the kids that are laughing at me? My generation was (and some of us still are) impressed with the hardware and the amazing advances it has made in our lifetime. Younger adults expect the hardware to be cool and fast. They're more fascinated with the content than the device used to access it. We've gone from dial up to light-speed fiber optics right up to our door in less than ten years. We've gone from choppy music videos on the new-fangled world wide web to posting and watching our own videos on YouTube - all in less than 20 years. There are now more than 100 million Web sites on the Internet, and more actual Web pages than there are people on earth.

What will the Internet look like in another decade? What form will the information take and how will we access it? I can pretty much guarantee that whatever your guess is, it's going to be wrong. I'm not even going to try to predict the future. I'm just going to focus on learning to speak "text."