Gadgets Today And Yesterday
Sometimes it seems that wherever one looks people seem, more
and more, to have small gadgets tucked in pockets, purses,
knapsacks and briefcases. They also seem to have succumbed to a
need to plug their ears with tiny pieces of foam attached to
tiny wires that trail down their bodies to... somewhere.
Gadgets abound in the world today. Gadgets of every type, size and function. From performing simple tasks to storing unimaginable amounts of information, gadgets have earned their right to have special pouches sewn into purses, dynamically-formed pockets melded into briefcase innards and entire knapsacks designed around their shapes and sizes.
By taking a look at some of the most prevalent gadgets we can see the evolvement and integration of this breed of technological devices—readily termed as 'advances'.
A common experience for most parents and grandparents is to enter a room populated by youngsters who appear to be mesmerized by a TV screen—while their bodies jerk, their fingers frantically prod and poke at handheld devices and they utter various guttural noises. They may or may not wear devices on their heads, covering ears and establishing a complete lack of auditory contact with anything except whatever comes through the wires. And wires there are! Everywhere it seems, wires leading to the TV, whose screen is the center of all attention. That screen usually reveals scenes from one of several thousand 'games' available to play through systems that are closely akin to computers.
Stumbling into a den of Playstation or X-Box game players can be unsettling for the uninitiated. Intensely involving and extremely stimulating, these gaming systems bring a level of interaction that can seem overwhelming to those of us brought up on skipping rope or even on 'Pong'. Taking games to new heights, these systems turn the idea of the interactive excitement of such board games as 'Risk' or 'Monopoly' into interactions with life-like, animated elements capable of extraordinary feats. Playstation, X-Box and the very new Wii gaming systems strive to bring near-reality to every game scenario. Whether racing through the desert in a dune-buggy, or shooting aliens on an orange planet, the games are designed to whole-heartedly involve the player's mind and emotions. The Wii system takes gaming a step further, bringing physical interaction back to game-playing—the player no longer twitches a thumb to hit a tennis ball, he swings his arm holding the special Wii system controls.
Gadgets for entertainment are not new, but their proliferation and diversity is new. The innovation of recorded music and video followed the seemingly natural evolution from wax cylinders and cellulose tapes, to pressed discs and color films and into the digital age—where a thousand songs fit, somehow, into a postage stamp-sized memory 'stick' and the latest movie is viewed from an iridescent disc read by a laser.
The wonderful thing about gadgets is that the technology that brought them to us also translates the search for new applications into the medical, educational and utility fields. We enjoy new medicals gadgets that stimulate our hearts, scan our organs non-invasively and give us back perfect vision lost through aging. We have images and learning brought to children that could never be experienced otherwise and we benefit from new developments in energy use that can give us back a revived environmental quality of life.
Gadgets abound, and they are here to stay, so stop a moment the next time you pass a store counter filled with them—and ask questions—the young clerk will be happy to reveal everything they know about each of them.
