I looked up a word in the dictionary the other day… online, of course, at Dictionary.com. I popped into the Thesaurus for another word. It started me thinking on things that on things that have changed for the better since I was a child.
Don’t get me wrong, I still own a printed dictionary, and a Spanish/English dictionary, but both of them are from the early 1990s. (Mental note: get rid of both to clear up shelf space.) If we asked how to spell a word, we were directed to the dictionary… heaven forbid it was something that started with a “ph” or other disguised sound. While that’s still an issue online, web dictionaries are constantly updated as languages continue evolving.
When’s the last time you opened an actual map? Do you remember getting directions with landmarks or street names? Or even more recently, in the early days of online navigation, having to print out the MapQuest (apparently still a thing) directions… that website was a blessing when I first moved to Chicagoland and had no idea where anything was. Now every smartphone includes mapping software, sometimes more than one, and except for the rare disconnected moment, we can always figure out where we are and where we’re going.
And we can do it using high speed internet! My first modem was 2400 baud, and I was still using dial-up internet until 2004. For anybody who missed the dial-up era, at 2400 baud, it took about an hour to download a 1 MB file. For context, the photos my current phone takes range from 4 to 8 MB. (Don’t worry, phones didn’t take photos back then!)
And now I’m wondering what changes Gen Z will look back on in a similar way. What can we improve for our children, and what will they improve for future generations?