Flying cars and television phones
What the future looked like in the 1960's
Every Monday morning, I receive a business coaching Email from MondayMorningMemo.com. This week’s Email was pretty interesting to me because I have this love-hate relationship with all things technological, AND, I’m old enough to remember 1969.
Here’s a tidbit from the Email.
Had you asked us in 1969 to describe our vision of 2009, we would have told you of flying cars, driverless cars and carburetors that would get 200 miles per gallon.
If you told us the cars of 2009 would travel at the same speeds and get about the same gas mileage we were getting in 1969, we would have rolled our eyes and thought you a fool.
Once, at a friend’s house, we pulled out some articles from a 1960’s-era Reader’s Digest which predicted this very thing by the 1990’s. The illustrations were great. Think Jetsons.
One other quote from this Email caught my attention.
(Few) in 1969 would have said, “In 2009 we’ll carry cordless telephones that will have TV screens in them and all the world’s knowledge will be at your fingertips because you’ll be connected to a thing called the worldwide web. And that TV screen will show you any movie and let you listen to any song, any time you want. And you’ll be able to tell it where you want to go and the screen will show you a map of how to get there. And as you travel, the map will continually update to show you where you are. The map will even talk to you and tell you where to turn. And there won’t be any long distance charges.”
But, it’s the Email author’s concluding question that really sums up the challenges we all face in our tech-mad world. His question should make us evaluate what’s real and what’s really important to us.
When’s the last time you had an extended, face-to-face conversation with someone who was important enough to you that you turned your cell phone completely off, rather than just setting it to vibrate so you could check to see if the caller was important enough to interrupt the conversation?
I even see people doing this in church, of all places. They just can’t bear to turn off their phones, afraid of missing some meaningless, trivial text message or phone call.
Some of us can remember “front porch” days, when people would sit on their front porches and have real, meaningful conversations with their families and neighbors, and there were actual relationships and connections made with people.
Let me put in a little plug… In a way, this is what portraits help you do. They help you connect. They help you remember. They help you remember relationships and connections. Especially family portraits. So, while I’m not exactly pushing family portraits in this message, I am encouraging all of us to once again cultivate the relationships in our lives.
Thanks for reading my muses today.
-Tracy
The Colorado Springs photographer
Tags: family portraits, flying cars, friends and neighbors, iPhone, relationships