Warning: Future Ahead

Wil Wheaton writes:

"Years ago, I had a conversation with my son about my record collection, and he couldn’t believe that we used to put records in crates that were heavy and bulky, and actually took them with us to parties. I remember holding up my iPod – which was big and bulky by today’s standards – and telling him that I could hold more music in this little thing than I could fit in my entire apartment on vinyl when I was in college. I may as well have told him how great it was that we didn’t have to worry about Indian attacks in our house, he was so unimpressed.

And why would he have been impressed? He’s grown up in The Future. My kids have never seen a floppy disc, heard the sound of a modem connecting, blown into a NES cartridge in the futile hope of making it work, or looked up an address in a Thomas Guide. I have experienced all of these things, and though I’m grateful that I don’t have to deal with them in any meaningful way now, unless I want to, it’s odd to me that, at just 36 years-old, I straddle this tremendous and significant technological rubicon, while my children can barely see it in on the distant horizon behind them, as they speed away on their jet packs and rocket bikes. I mean, they hardly remember cassettes, let alone cassingles, and occasionally I will consider this fact and quietly weep for them, alone, while they play Call of Duty against some stranger on the other side of the world in real time."

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