With technology touching new heights every day, saving us from boredom, inadequacy and “completing” us, the feeling of life being easier and merrier with technological tools only gets stronger. No, we don’t need any of these gadgets to complete our lives per se, but their contribution to the general comfort and convenience also cannot be discounted. Each generation, each decade has something new to throw and contribute to the techno culture, making it an ever dynamic entity. People from each decade are generally smug in their techno superiority over their immediate predecessors, and I feel they are perfectly entitled to that. Having factored all this in, still I feel if I had traveled either forward or backward in time, I would term the current generation very defining and rate it very highly.
Come to think of it, every tool at our disposal right now has been through so many refinements, so many standardizations and then reached that utility and desirability making you feel, “Is this it? Could it be made any better?” The answer to which would be a subtle, smug “No.” One could counter this by saying “Every era feels so.” But I strongly feel one would have good things to say about this generation, even if one were to belong to some other time. Have we seen the best in miniaturization, magnification and convergence?
What more do we do to the laptops that has not been done yet keeping utility, feasibility and practicality in mind? Do we want them to talk? Do we want them to be folded into quarters? How much smaller do we want to see our iPods? Nano? (Pun intended). Do we want to cram our TV into our iPhones? What more do we want to shove into our trucks or cars that isn’t there already? Do we want them to shoot some wings out? Television sets have become flatter, slimmer and larger. Do we want them paper size? I have mentioned a few at random, but you get the drift. The possibilities are endless, but the innovations that come have to be introduced keeping in mind all the qualities mentioned earlier with a sure sense of aesthetics and ergonomics. Otherwise, all those junkies like the outlandish concept cars, the radio watches that you might have seen in magazines or tech shows would have inundated us for worse. Things are good the way they are now. I am not even delving into how mechanized our lives already are, and we do not need to add to that. No I am not a Luddite; I don’t want us to get back to striking two stones to make fire. I want science to give me everything that makes our lives worthwhile. However, I feel there is a limit, and this is where, in my iterations, the current generation scores. There is always a scope for improvement and innovation, but let it not be at the cost of the human touch, the organic feel, and the sense of terra firma.
Santosh Kumar T.K. is a graduate student in forest products. He can be contacted at [email protected].