A few years back, my nephew's grade school was focusing on Presidents' Day. My brother-in-law was apparently trying to put history in context for said nephew by explaining, "When George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were President, there were no lights and no TV, and..," when my nephew--serious as a plane crash--interrupted with, "Stop it. You're scaring me." When my sister related the tale to me, I absolutely roared with laughter. But then I confessed--only half-jokingly--"If he'd said, '...and no internet,' I would have run screaming into the night."
To me, the true test of a technology is the answer to the question, "How did I live without this?" If it takes more than five seconds to envision the answer, it's a game-changer, in the major league sense of "game". Anything else is merely a frill, possibly just a fad.
Believe it or not, I do remember life before the Internet. Now instead of feng shui'ing my time around library hours and the city bus schedule (and hoping that at least one of the libraries has the information I need), I merely fire up a PC (another "How-the-heck-did-I-live-without-this?" game-changer, but that kinda goes without saying) and launch a search engine (which has also changed over the years).
I also remember life before what we used to call "walkman headphones." (The single hard plastic earbud for a transistor radio--AM only, even!--doesn't count.) Now I spend at least thirty hours a week with headphones in, just to focus on what needs doing. They've variously been plugged into my workstation's sound-jack, a few different MP3 players, and (once upon a time) a cassette player. But the headphones have always been there as an accessory for focusing. Since about 1984, anyway...For answering machines, I was a little late to the party, not having one until the early nineties. My mother insisted that they were "rude." Me, I thought it was ruder still to make the people who want/need to talk to you run you to ground. And along came email, which is muuuuch less intrusive/obtrusive, with the bonus you can include pictures or other files with it. And...for those folks whose email I want to give priority access, there is forwarding to my El Cheapo pay-as-you-go cellphone via SMS.
I even remember life before VCRs (not to mention DVD and BluRay players), Web 2.0, microwaves, instant messaging and cable TV. All game-changers in their own right, in most cases spawning whole sub-industries. But you could take away any or all of them and I'd somehow manage to live a full life--personally as well as professionally.
So my challenge is to figure out what to create that most folks can't imagine living without. Or at least don't want to even imagine living without.
