Technology Hostages.

I want to travel back in time, carrying only my tablet and maybe a phone or MP3 player. Not hundreds of years, not even fifty years, maybe just 20 years. A hundred years ago I would have been burned at the stake as a witch, just by playing a bit of music and showing photos on the above equipment. Fifty years ago the newspapers and publishing world would have made my equipment disappear and me along with it. Two decades ago I would have been anointed a global genius as the web in its infancy looked towards a wireless future of connectivity and entertainment.

Ten years ago the iPod was considered the height of miniaturisation and technology innovation, six years ago the iPhone took further hold on our imagination and three years ago the iPad gave us a reason to stop buying paper products and enriched ours lives with just a ten inch screen. I use the Apple products as a timeline example only, as I look around my world and see a decade of shift that won't be reproduced again. Technology has come such a long way in such a short time that expectations are heightened to the extent we now expect everything to work all the time and when it doesn't, we have no benchmark for our irrational behaviour towards technology. The expectation that someone somewhere is already working on our wildest dreams can over shadow what we have today and I see it daily in the frustrations encountered in what we consider the most mundane of technology.

Where's my folder, why is it taking so long to boot up, how come my system freezes, why isn't it working like it was this morning, did you change my settings and a plethora of frustrated out bursts litter our offices, lounge rooms and cafes. We have careened into the future so fast that we forgot where we came from and how difficult it used to be just to imagine today. The greatest innovations of our time, the car, television, air travel and spandex, all took years to mature and for society to fully embrace them and in spandex' case to leave them behind. Even the Internet took a while to catch on but now it's about how quickly technology can move to keep up with its own publicity and deliver results beyond our wildest fancies.

In fact technology has replaced our future to such an extent, we no longer dream of the future, we expect it delivered to our front door. The moon used to be so far fetched that nothing we thought of technologically was ridiculous, yet today we live and breathe the ridiculous every day. We are so entrenched in a technology future that the obstacles we encountered twenty years, ten years or even two years ago seem trivial, so trivial as to make us hostages to expectations that technology has the ability to fulfil our wildest dreams. Beam me up Scotty.