I am slightly nearsighted. Without glasses I have wonderful vision at about two feet away (the distance of a computer screen, more or less). I can see ok at a distance, but when I drive or go to a movie, I wear glasses to get that extra little bit of sharpness.
But here’s something odd: Whenever I look out from an airplane window without my glasses, everything below seems perfectly sharp and clear. Of course when I put on my glasses, all sorts of new details pop into view. Yet without the glasses, I never feel like I’m missing those details — it’s as though they never existed.
Yesterday I was at a dinner party where somebody who grew up with cellphones and the Web was asking what it was like before those technologies existed. “How did you find things and reach people?” he asked.
Those of us who had been around back in the days before cell phones and the Web explained that there had never been any sense of something missing. You could reach somebody by phone because you knew when they would be at home or at their desk. As for finding information, in the library you could learn all about any topic under the sun. When you wanted to arrange a meeting at work, you sent around a memo.
I suspect it has always been like this. People who lived before the age of the telephone, the airplane and the automobile didn’t miss them. Life, work and relationships had a way of adapting seamlessly to whatever technology happened to exist at the time.
I wonder, twenty years from now, when technology has advanced yet again, and the SmartPhones and Web browsers of today seem hopelessly clunky and inconvenient, whether young people will ask how we all managed to get along with only the paleolithic technologies of 2011.