My grandfather was born in 1931. In 1927, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica, the television was invented, and in 1937 the first digital computer. He studied electrical engineering in college in the early 50’s and worked on electronics in some shape or form until his retirement a few years before I was born. He understands how a tube TV works, how information passes through fiber optic cables, and the difference between AM and FM radio. He knows how to wire his own circuit board.
With all of that experience under his belt, it wasn’t until the age of 89 that he found himself FaceTiming his family on his iPhone.
He loved it.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to go from a small, black and white TV in your childhood home to a small, livestream feed of your loved ones in the palm of your hand. We have only video chatted a few times before, and always it was a process, with my Dad helping him set up Skype on his desktop computer. Now it’s instantaneous, and I can show him the couch I call him from, or the park where I’m always going on walks. I’m kicking myself for not having done it sooner.
89 years from today, the world will change more than we are capable of imagining. Even 63 years from now, when I’m my grandfather’s age, we’ll have technology that defies our understanding of what is possible. We’ll keep up with it for a while, upgrading to the newest smartphone, adopting whatever form social media has taken, but eventually the pace of change will become too fast, and our ability to learn too slow. We’ll be the grandparents who need our grandchildren to book us flights to Mars.
That’s why I love my grandfather’s attitude towards the whole thing. At this point in his life, technology has left him behind. He uses email but gets confused by the login screen; he’s on Facebook but doesn’t know how to find anyone’s page. Even so, he loves every bit of it, and if technology is helping him get closer to old friends and family, then he accepts it without question. He used to tell people, “I stopped being embarrassed by my grandson’s superior computer skills a long time ago,” acknowledging the hard truth that an uneducated child knew more about computers than a career engineer. Now he just smiles back at his iPhone screen and chuckles at the crystal clear image of his grandson.