The Good Old Days.

Over the Christmas period, talk often heads in the direction of "the good old days" referring to a range of things that have been embellished with time and story telling. Eyes glaze over for anyone under 20 years for as far as they are concerned every day is a "good old day".

With everything available to everyone all the time it's hard to wonder what the "good old days" actually looked like. Things that caused problems revolved around communication and information and people feeling left in the dark and anxious about their future.

If you arrived on earth from space today, you would wonder what they were talking about as communication has exploded while information is available everywhere, all the time, on everything. So no one should feel like they are in the dark and anxious about the future, or should they?

Will the Y's and the I's talk about the good old days 20 years from now? What will they talk about? Will it be the fact that there were still mysteries to be solved and everything about everything was not known, will it be about still having privacy and not having the world know everything about you or will they just talk about what libraries used to be for? The speed of innovation and immersion in information today makes two decades equivalent to a century.

So will the next great super group pass by in 6 months and not have the decades long influence of the Beatles? Will the TV season be 4 weeks and every episode of your favorite show is streamed to your smartphone (what will that look like) every 10 minutes because your attention span has withered to 5 minutes max? Will you finally be able to teleport to London and not worry about Heathrow snow spoiling your travel plans?

No matter what era, people will always be talking and telling stories about "good old days". Details will vary but as long as the story telling doesn't stop we will retain the humanity that keeps us coming together for many Christmas' to come and that is the joy of the season.

For those interested, the research labs from Google, IBM and the world congress of libraries, along with historians and linguists have now pinpointed a specific weekend in 1962 as THE "good old days".

It was a temperate 25 degrees, Elvis was alive and the Beatles were just coming into their own, the future contained hope and people were rewarded for a hard days work. Strangers greeted you on the street, men were men and women were women and there were only four TV stations to choose from. Until 11.55pm the study also confirmed the radio was keeping us fit twisting to Chubby Checker during these two "good old days".