No, not the The Leftovers TV show…. The “left-behinds”—those who are failing to keep pace with the technological revolution. I am increasingly one of them.
At one time, I was among the “techno” leaders. I was one of the first academics to embrace email and did so at a time when most of my colleagues were rejecting email as a method of communication. I have previously mentioned secretaries I knew in days gone by who resisted having their typewriters replaced by computers and word processing programs. They were among the first left-behinds. At the time, I didn’t fully understand why they were resisting what seemed to me an obvious improvement in document production. Even when “word processing” became common, however, the main delay in getting a document from Point A to Point B was from the time it took to put the document in a stamped envelope and have it transported to its destination. Email was the solution to that problem.
Email required electronic addresses, and electronic addresses enabled websites. It didn’t take long for corporations and other major organizations to develop websites and to start including their Web addresses in their TV and other advertising. One year when my father visited me in Kalamazoo and we were watching TV, every time an ad would say something about “visit us at website.com,” my father would say, “I don’t know what ‘dot com’ means….” He was one of the left-behinds….
I had been among the first to teach a distance-learning class based on one-way video and two-way electronic communication. I was also one of the first to teach a fully online class in business communication. I have spent most of my days for the past 20 years working (and recreating) looking at a computer screen. Almost all my communication is computer-based (email, blogging, the SCS Beyond Mastery Newsletter, text messages, and video-based conversations (usually by Skype). Nevertheless, I am increasingly becoming one of the “left-behinds.”
Where I am not keeping up is with social media. There’s obviously a whole world of social media out there of which I am only vaguely aware, and my attitude about it is essentially the same as my father’s comment about the “dot com” revolution.
I belong to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and You-Tube, but I really don’t do much with any of them. I am astounded when I see (or read about) how much some people rely on social media for routine communication and for mass communication. Some of those I am connected with on Facebook, for example, post 15 or 20 times a day. I have seen articles about how many people follow Donald Trump’s “tweets,” and from time to time I am reminded at how people I know are using LinkedIn to communicate with their professional colleagues. And then, of course, there are a lot of “special interest” social media sites (such as Pinterest), and that number seems to be growing almost daily.
At some point, of course, everyone becomes increasingly obsolete. Everyone? Yes, everyone. Even Einstein has become obsolete, as mathematics and physics have moved beyond the Theory of Relativity and into Quantum Mechanics. More in fitting of what most of us know, the late nineteenth-century example of that referred to the future of buggy-whip makers as the automobile gained ascendency. There are still a few buggy-whip makers, of course. With some regularity, I drive through parts of Indiana where the Amish continue to use horses and buggies instead of automobiles, so somebody somewhere still makes buggy whips. I am not so sure about typewriters, however….
If you are old enough to be in the “falling behind” generation, it seems to me that the most important things are, first, to know your values, and, second, to accept your limits. The Amish know their values and choose to avoid a mechanized, electronic life. Each of us also has limits. Just as everyone has physical limits, with some able to run faster and farther than others and some able to jump higher and farther than others, everyone also has mental limits. Different people have different mental gifts, and even the smartest among us doesn’t know everything. The person who is most gifted at mathematics, may not be the most gifted at languages. The person who knows the most about literature, may not be the person who knows the most about music, and so on.
No subject stands still. My parents were in the “falling behind” generation for music when Rock and Roll became the “thing.” My interest in new music started fading out in the 1980s and definitely faded as “heavy metal” became the standard. My son was not only comfortable with heavy metal but also made the shift into rap. I have not been able to develop much of an appreciate for either. I still occasionally hear new music that I really enjoy, but such discoveries are few and far between at this point, and most of the new music that I like is basically like the older musical forms I have always liked.
Change also happens in other branches of knowledge, of course. Every now and then someone writes an article about medical doctors who aren’t keeping up with the latest research, and we have ample evidence that many politicians really do not understand science (even if some of that failure to understand is prompted by financial incentives). A long time ago, one of the great family therapists, Virginia Satir, wrote about the “lure of the familiar,” our tendency to return to what we already know. My guess is that tendency increases as we age.
And a very long time ago, the Ancient Greeks had a saying: Know Thyself. When you truly know yourself, you can recognize whether you are becoming increasingly left behind because you simply aren’t making the effort required to keep up, or when you are making good decisions about where to focus your energies.
