IMG_6168 copia-min

30.04.2019.

Technology

I’m taking out the clothes out of the dryer while my grandmother is looking at me from the photo on the wall. My clothes are warm, soft and they smell really nice and it’s enough just to fold them and don’t need to iron them at all. My granny had to get the water from their well first, then warm it on the stove, fill the iron with hot cole and she had to perform a “choreography” swinging the iron in the air for the cole to remain glowing. I am a woman of the 21st century and to do all that I just need to press the button. This grandma gave birth to 11 children and she didn’t even have a washing machine, nor a refrigerator, and she didn’t have throwaway diapers either. My dad said they got a refrigerator in the 1960s and added that when he worked in the desert of Algeria in the 80s, there was no fridge and there was impossible to buy one either.

Life has become so much easier! It seems almost unreal that in my fairly short lifetime I experienced the color TV and the first mobile phone. My Hungarian grandmother’s first means of transport was her horse “Baby” that she rode to a city 40km far when she needed a more serious shopping for supplies, and her granddaughter had an electric car. Eh, what is life in the era of the technological revolution!

I still remember the large wooden or plastic TV sets and the way we used to hit them on top with a fist to stop the picture from “running”, after which the picture would strangely stop for a while. I remember the day when the color TV arrived at our house and how it soon became the most normal thing in every household. I also remember the say we finally got the phone line connected (in new housing developments in that time you had to wait for years). I remember my dad’s PC with yellow letters on the monitor and the time when tapes, walkmans and VHS video came. And CD players! Do you remember car phones or those funny humongous mobile phones that rare (and obviously very busy businessmen carried on their shoulders? I vividly remember the day when SMS texts came – the ultimate craze of mobile communication and even who I got the first text from.

I’m looking at my pink mobile phone sitting on the table next to me. He has an X times more powerful processor than our first PC. The phone is my window to the world, it stores the half of my large book library and best of all – he enables me to be in contact with my son in seconds, and he lives 140km away with his father. Thanks to technology I can see and talk to him every day.

Yes, life is so much easier and faster but all we get used so fast to all the comfortable conveniences that soon we forget how precious they are (in making our life easy), until we are left without them, like for example, the gas in the car air-conditioner. Riding in a car seems almost unbearable now, yet do you remember how in our childhood they didn’t exist, and we survived, smaller and slower cars without air condition? We weren’t traumatized by that, weren’t we?

And just picture how kitchen’s look like today and all their convenient appliances?! I just love technology and I love the fact that a dishwasher was invented, the washing machine and a dryer too! Come to think of it, my whole apartment is full of electric appliances that my grandmothers would envy.

No one can convince me that life isn’t becoming easier and more beautiful and the world became a global village thanks to technology. Sadly, technology like anything else in the hands of man can simultaneously be a miraculous help or medicine and very destructive at the same time. It all depends on the man utilizing it. But let me return my focus to the benefits of it.

Hospitals, medical clinics, and dispensaries are full of technology that helps save lives, medicine and surgery are fascinatingly advancing and just think of a toothache today and just 100 years ago. Only remember your anesthesia 20 years ago when you didn’t feel half of your face and today, even for the tiniest procedure we get a wondrous thing that works perfectly and there is no fear that we are going to bite on our tongs afterward.

What about 3D printers and their super-precise computer guidance?! Recently, I saw on the internet a story about some loving and tech-savvy fathers who are printing fun, colorful fists to their handicapped children, who because of that doesn’t feel like powerless handicapped people but like little superheroes (and they’ve put the instructions free on the internet).

Painkiller tablets. Medicaments. Mobile banking. Internet shopping – to name a few.

I’m flipping the pages of my family album, looking at my grandmothers and myself. A little girl who thought she had the ugliest teeth in the world. I lift my gaze into the mirror on the wall and my lips stretch into a grin. I see a futuristic benefit of technology in my mouth. That little girl got a digitally designed smile and its perfect construction. That girl on the picture used to hide her smile with her hand – and to me, people are saying that my smile is beautiful.

My life in the era of technological revolution is really exciting and beautiful.

- Anđa Marić

Leave a Comment





Pin It on Pinterest