technology-evolution-history

How Our Technology Has Evolved Over Time

Kids these days have it pretty good, don’t they? Long gone are the days when you were hooked up to the Internet via your home telephone line – which meant that you couldn’t talk on the phone and surf the web at the same time. In fact, traditional phone lines are becoming more nonexistent by the second – and people are abandoning landlines in favor of Internet-based phone services. Advances in technology and new gadgets have made our lives significantly easier and more connected, but they have also changed our lives in ways that we couldn’t have predicted even as late as ten years ago. Here are a few ways that technology has evolved over time and made life’s problems a little bit easier to solve.

Life Before Smartphones

Can you even remember life before smartphones? These handy devices came into our lives and changed the way we socialize, work, and carry out our day-to-day tasks. Although we’ve made major advances in mobile technology, we’ve become a society that hardly talks – and a majority of our daily communication takes place via text! Just by taking a step outside and seeing people’s faces buried in their screens will give you a gist of how impactful smartphone technology has become. But in the pre-smartphone age, calling was much more widely accepted and face-to-face conversation was the norm.

From Blockbuster to Netflix

Netflix has taken over the Internet, to the point where 35 percent of all Internet traffic comes from streaming their video service. But before Netflix, we actually used to have to go to the store and rent a DVD (or VHS) and take it back at a pre-determined date. But who has time for that these days? Could you imagine having to remember to take a tape back to the store? It seems like something of the forgotten past, especially with emerging technology that allows on-demand streaming of thousands of movies and television shows. But in the Blockbuster era, we had to physically trek through aisles and aisles before finding a the perfect movie to rent.

From Dial-up To Wireless

In the dial-up days, America Online was the dominant player. AOL’s instant messaging platform was like the equivalent of today’s social media at the time. Dial-up Internet was slow, relatively unreliable, and cut out when someone answered the telephone. And of course, who can forget those annoying sounds when you were first connecting? Social media today is fairly ubiquitous compared to AOL Internet in its early days, when there weren’t nearly as many blogs or social communities to join. The evolution of social media has completely transformed our culture and our world.