Technology is the Great Anachronism
I’ve often said that technology is the great anachronism. What I mean by that is that technology identifies a period in time better than anything else. Anything that has a “style” attached to it, be it clothing, architecture or even language, would seem an obvious choice for an anachronism, but those things have a tendency to change and return in various forms, being cyclical in nature. Technology on the other hand rarely, if ever, takes a step back. When we look at a picture of an artist in his home with an early Macintosh, we can pretty much assume it’s from the mid-80s just the same way we can look at a picture of a person talking on brick of a car phone with the curled cord going into the console and say “early 90s.”
Personally, I think it’s when a technology that has become such a staple of modern life becomes obsolete, that’s when we really notice what I’m talking about. For example, from 2000 to 2010, several stalwart technologies we’d all grown up around more or less disappeared. Who uses phone books now? When was the last time you bought a CD in a store? Or had a land line installed in your home? Or best of all, used a phone booth on the streets, let alone see one in operation?
The Huffington Post has a great gallery of technology that became obsolete in this decade…