Too old to trust the new technology in old-time Phoenix


As someone who is trying to hang onto a youthful, if not middle-aged, attitude about life, I often think about what it means to be too old to trust the new technology. I live in the 21st Century, and my experience has been that people tend to draw a line against new technology at a particular age. I've seen people draw that line at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, wherever they feel necessary to say that they can't possibly trust any particular new technology, whether it's self-driving cars, or cell phones. Of course, this makes me wonder about old-time Phoenix.


There are many examples of new technologies in old-time Phoenix, but my favorite one is the "horseless carriage" - what we would call an automobile, or car, today. And when I imagine what people are thinking in the 1904 picture at the top of this post, I try to read the mind of the man in the horse and wagon. He wouldn't have trusted those darn things! You wouldn't get him in one of those, no sir-ee!

And there would have been many things that old-timers wouldn't have trusted around that time. There would be elevators, and aspirin, and electricity, and zippers. The list goes on and on, I'm sure you can think of more turn-of-the-century new technology!

Speaking for myself, I wonder when I'll be too old to trust the new technology? It really hasn't happened to me yet, I'm enthusiastic about all of the new inventions happening around me, and I can't wait to try them out. And I try not to stereotype someone, just because they might have grey whiskers, as being "too old". Heck, my whiskers are grey, and I'm in line for one of the first self-driving cars.

But I've learned to recognize that look in someone's eye when they're about to rant about some "new-fangled" thing, which is just a bunch of tom-foolery, and like to get us all killed. And I just smile and let it go. Because what I hear is, "Get a horse!"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more