It just now occurred to me that some of yall don’t remember a time before touch screens
Like. The first popular touch screens I knew of were high end new-edition ipods and that was their defining trait. No buttons.
“But how do we use it without buttons?” Well. It has three buttons. Power and volume.
My whole class full of middle class kids had ipod nanos, ipod shuffles they got for Christmas. I had an MP3 player, and before that, a cassette player and a portable CD player.
The ‘ipod touch’ was goddamn crazy. Like, space-age shit.
I swear to god when I got one as a gift from a well-off relative it had no music, no games, I didn’t know how to connect it to the internet, nothing, but the reality of a smooth screen that responded when you touched it like some kind of goddamn hologram, like a pocket mirror with color-changing cuttlefish skin that knew I was touching it, that I just spent a solid hour and a half in my room just swiping the screen back and forth.
And the idea that you could connect to the INTERNET on it?? And not the expensive shitty pixelated crap you paid $50 a minute for on your flip phone, but WHOLE WEBSITES? JUST LIKE ON A LAPTOP? Ooooooooooohmygod.
And it was small enough to hide under the covers with!! I could read after bedtime!!! Before that, I had a second-hand digital camera, and I’d take photos of my comic books during the day so I could read through them later on the tiny ass 2"x2" view screen. And before THAT, it was a bedside lamp I’d scramble to turn off if it sounded like someone was getting close to the stairs.
And after the ipod touch, card readers started getting touch screens. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to being encouraged to smear my fingerprints on the glass.
And SMARTBOARDS? Hoooooooooooooooly shit.
Like. I’m not even old yet, and every so often I just suddenly remember that the world I knew at that age doesn’t exist anymore.
And what’s all this going to become?
Who knows