I'm sitting in North Central Indiana listening to WNUA out of Chicago - great jazz station - and thinking about life twenty, thirty years ago.
I remember feeling somewhat ripped from my home in 1970, sitting in my bedroom as a young teen, waiting for the night atmosphere to "free" up just right so that I could get a scratchy WLS clear down in the sticks of Missouri. Another Chicago great. I don't listen to WLS anymore even though I still like the rock and roll that they played back them. It seems like a miracle to hear the station from so far away. My dad tried to explain the phenomena, but alas! the explanation was lost on me.
Anyway, my current stream of thoughts relates to the clarity of the sound coming from my computer speakers. I listen to WNUA from my Internet connection. So cool. My students are amused to hear about how traffic is going along Lake Shore Drive in the morning.
What did we do before computers? Do you remember what life was like before our home PCs were the central focus of our living room floor plans? What about cell phones? Somehow we survived! I'm sure I wrote more letters, read more books, actually did research in a library, called on a rotary phone. Remember those? I hated the 9 and 0 - took too long to get back around. And I miss having a book in my hands - I still go to the library. A book - there's something sacred about books. Historical markers, cultural concrete.
My students and I were talking about 8-track tapes today. There's such a revulsion for old, out-of-date or antiquated items. I can't say that I'd want to bring 8-tracks back, but there's no need to get nasty!
Technology. Not all bad. What patterns of behavior, traditions, or things should we make an effort to hang on to as technology advances?
Eight-track? In 1984, I bought a 1971 Buick Electra that had an eight-track player in it. I still don't know if the darned thing worked, never having owned such a tape.
The only computer that has ever graced my living room was in 1989-1990. I lived in Albuquerque, but worked in Sunnyvale CA, having bought my first "luggable" (14 pounds worth) computer. I kept it on a wooden TV tray in the living room of my apartment in Sunnyvale. It was the only thing that I worried about as I sat in my car at a stop light during the major tremors of the Loma Prieta 7.2 earthquake. It did fine. (I had taken the precaution of positioning the computer diagonally across the table--a wise precaution, as it turned out.) Fortunately, I've had a den in all of the houses in which I've lived since then--fitting places for computers.