technolution

on monday, i sent out an email to a whole bunch of nachtigals, informing of the existence of this blog. like 25-30 nachtigals. 3 of those mails bounced back because apparently the addresses weren't active anymore. how many responses do you think i've received to those mails which didn't bounce? exactly ONE. seriously, people. what's going on? are we, as a family, really so non-computer-minded? this isn't rocket science. all it would have taken was one click, which was no doubt highlighted as a link in the mail that i sent. i guess i need to face that maybe our family simply isn't interested in preserving our stories. however, i still am, so i will continue, even if i'm talking only to myself.

this lack of response to technology got me thinking...about all of the technological changes seen by the nachtigals over the past century. and wondering what advances will happen in my lifetime.

take for a minute grandma kate, and imagine the changes she saw. she saw the advent of widespread use of electricity, indoor plumbing, the automobile, the airplane, even the telephone--from a central switchboard community-kind-of-thing to landlines and maybe the beginning of the mobile (she never had one, but they must have been starting to be around during her lifetime--if only in the form of those heavy monster boxes that used to crush your foot in the car if it fell over). she didn't necessarily partake of or even be properly socialized into all of that technology--she never did, after all, learn how to be polite on the phone. when she was done talking, you knew it, not because she said "good-bye," but because you heard her voice receding and then an abrupt hang-up. and i don't recall her ever driving a car, but she was certainly a passenger in many of them--asking along the entire journey, "now who lives there?"

dad remembers that first oh-so-bright lightbulb hanging over the table at the house down on the creek. in the version of the story in my head, the electricity was generated by a windmill. and now i'm living in a country where one of their biggest exports is the modern vestas windmill and where a good percentage of the power is generated by wind. just look at the changes that have happened there:

farm windmill

the copenhagen wind farm in øresund

what technolutionary* changes has our family gone through? and what further developments will we and our children see? these are interesting questions to ponder. i find that i can't really imagine what they might be--but can imagine some applications on the medical front. i can see that sabin, who is 7 now, is completely at ease with a computer and has always been. it's intuitive for her to click the mouse and to explore an online universe--whether it's a littlest pet shop world or a word girl game on PBS kids. perhaps there will be some union of man and machine that i can imagine only the faintest glimmer of. what i would like to think though, is that these stories of our family will be here, in cyberspace, for her to read and grow and learn from. that they will, thanks to technology, not be lost.

* this word was coined by my father-in-law, peter broberg, who invented a field of study by the same name which looks at the effect technology has had on evolution. but, i use it in a more local sense--to express the technological advances, or technological evolution, we have seen as a family.