The other day in class a student asked me what has changed since I was a student. It is wide open question that has many answers; the Red Sox and Cubs have both won World Series, the Soviet Union and East Germany no longer exist and so much more. On the other hand much has stayed the same; the Middle East is still a political mess, Joe Biden is still in politics (indeed that would be true if you had asked some of my professors the same question 30 years ago) and SNL and the Tonight Show are still on TV.
Much of this has had minimal impact on my daily life and that is what i want to focus on, how has daily life changed? I think the best way to show a little bit of that is to analyze one device. I ti snot the most important device and it is not the most valuable thing any of own but it may be the most regularly used, the smart phone.
The smartphone as we know it did not make its commercial appearance until about 2002, they are so common we think of them as being around forever but not so. When I was an undergraduate to be able to do the things the smartphone does would have required me to carry about 150 pounds worth of equipment; a camera, a video camera, a walk man and tapes, a set of encyclopedias, various games like chess or scrabble, a mobile phone and so much more. This was heavy and expensive and impossible. Think about it, you are bored in class and you whip out your phone (you know who you are and so do I, I can see a lot form up there) and check email and play a game and book tickets home and all while pretending to pay attention in class. I would have had to leave class to so some of that and I am not sure what would have happened if I had pulled out a chess set and started playing.
We have so much more convenience which saves us so much time than 30 years ago. How are we using it?
When we think about how convenient smartphones are, we do see that it has impacted our lives tremendously. I did not realize until now how much phones have impacted my generation. They have become a way to easily look up things that would have taken someone hours to find in a library. Smartphones have become a way of communication that can make it easier to communicate with others we have not seen in a while but also hinder our social skills. I have noticed much more that when it comes to a set of people together it is easy to see almost half of the people on their phones rather than talking to the person right in front of them.…
I certainly enjoyed reading this blog post as it serves as a mere reflection into our own lives as well. Now that I am graduating from Regent in the next couple of months, I have come to the realization through your own professional reflection that maybe it is time for me to call upon the changes I've experienced in my life (as well as the world around me). I think that the beauty of life is how no one day is the same as the next. Much of macroeconomics even explains how the world around us is constantly changing, innovating, and paving the way for new and improved ideas in the business realm. I believe that the journal article "Transformation:…
It is so hard to think about life before the smart phone but reading this blog entry made me think about the things were not able to do previous to the creation of it. Ordering groceries, managing finances, and connecting on social platforms are just a few of many different functions available to smart phone users and owners. I have been using my cell phone/smart phone so much more now than ever for workouts, daily inspiration, and calorie counting. These are available functions on my smart phone that I have historically never used before. The smart phone has truly become an essential part of human life. The most helpful ways I have noticed I use my smart phone have been…
I never really thought about how smartphones have impacted our world . I couldn’t imagine how things would get done however I remember how much having a computer impacted me late in elementary and in middle school. I remember writing papers by hand and turning it into my teacher just to see a color map of incorrectly spelled words, highlighted fragment sentences and blue pen notes for punctuation mistakes. Until in middle school we started writing, I’m sorry, typing our papers on the computer and printing them out for a grade. I never really mentioned it when I was younger but I feel the generation that I grew up in went through the most dramatic change in technology. Adding the…