I like technology! It’s all over me and I’m all over it. It brings me to you and you to me. It also keeps you from me if, you know, that’s more appropriate. It has transformed the practice of law, the field of intellectual property, and everyday life in all sorts of ways that even a paragraph this full of cliches could not describe without using even more of them.
One of the things I often think about when considering electric magic stuff is how different my college experience would have been if I had the toys today’s students have when I was prowling the lawns of Princeton in my cap and gown. (We wore those to class in those days.) I remember investing in an answering machine for my dorm room — the kind that took full-size cassette tapes — when I got a single and there were no roommates around to take messages for each other. This was a great device! People could leave a message for you. For when you were not near the phone. Before graduation I wrote my (execrable) senior thesis using an even cooler device, which, like the answering machine in my room, also used a cassette tape to store data: A personal computer called a Commodore VIC 20.
Ah, memories. (It’s cliche day!) As I said, my economics thesis was so bad I should have written it with a crayon, and the fact that I was using technology that was already well-nigh obsolete (other kids had these Macintosh thingies) didn’t spoil my fun or my excitement. Who knew? The scholarship, the answering machine, the PC, and in many respects the man were all in for major changes. Indeed, we were all of us ensconced in one of the newest dorms on campus, located in what was called New New Quad — which itself was deemed obsolete by Princeton Inc. and leveled not all that long ago, to considerably more ambivalence than met the passing of these other old-fashioned notions of high technology.
Journey with me, then, along the path of a new infographic from my buddies at Nowsourcing featuring Technology, Then vs. Now in the academy.
Image compliments of Master of Arts in Teaching Degrees
