I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
It's been used to criticize anyone who rejects new technology, but it's just a funny quote that has some truth to it.
As I've hit age defined in 3, some of it is also "Anything invented after you're thirty-five is mostly same stuff you had before but upgraded. You are confused why everyone is losing their minds over it."
>mostly same stuff you had before but upgraded. You are confused why everyone is losing their minds over it
That's a good way of thinking about this. [Showing my age here], I remember being unfazed about the web in the mid 90s, thinking to myself "I already have Encarta which does hypertext with multimedia so well, why do I need this new thing populated by random people".
But of course the web did have a lot to offer. I suppose I keep coming back to "Quantity has a quality all its own" - sometimes even a relatively small upgrade makes an existing solution suddenly accessible to more people and a viable solution to more problems.
