Here’s one for you. If you need to know something, it’s faster to connect to a computer thousands of miles away than it is to walk across the room to find the answer in a book. If you want to watch a movie, it’s faster to get it started through Netflix on a server somewhere else than it is to walk over to your pile of physical media (or your bookshelf if you’re that sort of person) and queue it up. If it’s a Blu-ray disc, it’s probably faster to start it on a server than it is to load up the disc even if the disc is already in the player.
It’s faster to send a text which requires typing than it is to connect a phone call. It’s faster to get the weather on your smartphone than it is to walk outside. I could go on and on, but you have to really wonder what effect all this instant access to information will have on a generation that grows up knowing nothing about pay phones, libraries, yellow pages, or outdoor thermometers. Everyone reading this today is old enough to remember when the smartphone wasn’t our go-to source for every single thing in our lives, but what about our kids?
