Technology has been around for a while, but the development the world has experienced since the beginning of the 21st century wasn't something I ever pictured as a kid. Sometimes, when I look around today and think about what life used to look like before many technological innovations became accessible to everyone, I just shake my head and laugh.
Today, we have smart phones, smart tvs, self driving cars and all these things started from little innovation that were very valuable to the human race as a whole back then.
Before the digital age, a lot of things we have today were only accessible for the wealthy ones in society, and they signified how rich people were. Then we had a television set that always required tapping the skull repeatedly before it cooperated with my dad. The TV was the major technology that baffled me a lot, and sometimes I ask silly questions while watching people moving around in it.
Are these people in the TV? How did they get in there? Sometimes, I wish my dad could open it up for me to see what's inside a TV, but that didn't happen. Those questions faded away slowly, and a lot of things felt normal until sometimes in 2002.
My dad had traveled out of the country before that year, and communicating with him was quite challenging because call centers were very rare and expensive, especially for international calls. We didn't stay in an environment where those things were available, so only my mom got the opportunity to go due to the distance, and the conversation was always short due to the charges.
Whenever my mom returned from the call center, she would relay my dad's message, and I didn't believe a lot of things she said because it just doesn't make sense how she spoke to someone in another country when speaking to someone in another state was a big deal. In my mind, I believe she was just saying all those things to keep our dad's memories fresh in our heads.
One faithful day, she took me along, and I couldn't comprehend what happened immediately I heard my dad's voice. I looked around the call center to be sure he wasn't sitting somewhere talking through the device, and truly he wasn't. I understood the fact that my dad wasn't in the country, but how we communicated was incomprehensible since it was my first time using a phone (the old landline).
I heard his voice clearly, and my eyes were filled with tears as we exchanged pleasantries, but unfortunately, the conversation wasn't as long as I wanted. On our way home, I couldn't stop thinking about that beautiful experience, and there were so many questions about the call, but my mom's explanation wasn't enough.
We visited the place a few other times, and I was forced to interact with those working there. Being a curious child, they liked me and always explained, but I barely understood how those things worked.
As the years passed, things changed, and even though communicating with my dad became easier, we still had to pay a lot of money.
I remembered the very day my mom got her first cellphone; it was a Nokia 5110, which we referred to as a as a feeding bottle because of the look. From the moment she got the phone, I became eager to see what more could happen as a cell phone. Whenever I saw someone with a smaller phone, I was always eager to operate just to see the functions.
Several times, I messed up phone settings and we have to seat with the phone manuals to fix things. Sometimes, we depend on customer care service to guide us and every discovery I made on this phones then jusy made me admire phones more.
Communication had become a lot easier, and slowly different upgrades happened to the extent that we can now make video calls or send messages through different social platforms instead of calls, play video games, listen to music and others. Technology has advanced so much, and I wonder what other developments we will experience in the future.
All image are mine