The Wow of Now...

Have you ever looked around at everyday stuff and wonder where the wow of now has gone?

It’s because in the world we live in there are very few new things to be invented. Instead, the things we already use or have exposure to are being improved upon. Being re-invented, but as things improve and modify the wow is gone. For the most part anyway. 

Think about it, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Yet here we are now, probably more than 90% of everyone reading this will be doing so on a smart phone. The initial principal is the same - it’s a telephone for making and receiving calls. But it has been reinvented many times. The inception of the smart phone was the last wow for the humble telephone. I took delivery of my new iPhone XS last week, a replacement for my previous iPhone 7. I am not ashamed to say it I am a fan of iPhones, have been for quite some time. The iPhone XS is still a smart phone just as my first iPhone 4 was, but just keeps being developed to give the end user more. However, it’s still a phone. 

I count myself incredibly lucky that I have grown up with many ‘wows’ happening in the advancement of technology and entertainment. How incredible is it to think that right now as I write this message there are 2.2billion people who were born after the age of the internet. That means there are potentially 5.5billion of us that remembers that first wow of being able to access any topic or subject at the press of a key stroke. 

Sadly too often it gets abused rather than celebrated. Think about it guys, right at this very moment in time you can find out the answer to pretty much anything. Imagine all the encyclopaedias ever published all right there at your fingertips. 

I love that I can learn something new just by an internet search, and all from my smart phone. I do know that this age of smart phones also means a lot of dumb people, purely because fake news is now easier to spread than ever. It’s fake news now, when once it was just a rumour or the murmurings of the grapevine, thankfully often dying off before they got spread far and wide. 

This is something that I consider as a paradox of progress. The very fact that there are great advancements in technology, medicine and communication etc over the past century but this has created more problems for people to deal with, instead of making life easier.

So where am I going with all this? Technology is great, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it. I have a healthy respect for it, but I respect it for its root purpose to educate, to bring the world to our fingertips and to enable us to share. To share thoughts, share creativity, share teachings, share inspiration. Not ever for it to be abused.

If you find that you can’t find inspiration, or you aren’t learning from what you look at then step back to just using your phone for something that starts with hello, and ends with bye. Take the time to appreciate the tool you have to access the world, and repeat after me ‘wow’!

Happy Damn Friday Peeps! x

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