THE INTERSECTION OF ERAS

Published June 20, 2018 in Jornal Diário de Santa Maria by Wagner Risso

In an era of varied social and cultural impacts and technological innovations, I notice that everyday life is changing at an immeasurable speed, and we are forced to absorb these changes, which cause a strong impact on us.

Especially in our daily routines, we are becoming increasingly anxious and impatient. I often reflect on this and ask myself how I will explain to my children that I knew a world where the internet was not available to everyone, and for a long time it was only available to a minority of people — and that within my social circle, I didn’t know anyone from that minority until I was 13 years old.

When I first encountered a computer, I remember being dazzled by that technology, which felt out of reach for me. I remember we usually used it to burn some CDs and download videos to create VCDs — a CD with video files. We burned clips of national and international songs that were popular in the early 2000s.

A world where we rented films on VHS tapes from video stores, especially on weekends, and soon after we witnessed an incredible technological evolution with the arrival of the DVD, which brought better image quality, didn’t get stuck, and had the most sensational feature of all: we no longer needed to rewind the films before returning them to the video store — a detail that once made me pay several fines because I forgot to do that rewinding.

And what can we say about the cell phone with its buttons, where the ability to exchange text messages was the great differentiator of that time, along with the addictive “snake game.”

We — the generation of technological transition — live in the “intersection of eras.” We are the last ones who were able to live in a world without the internet, where we had to do research in books and enormous encyclopedias that concentrated the world’s knowledge to be made available to anyone interested; a time when we needed to leave home to make bank transfers, shop, or call a taxi; a time when we listened to music on cassette tapes, a technology that came to replace the classic vinyl record and LPs. A time when iPods and Spotify did not reign, but rather the classic Walkman players — soon replaced by the modern Discman that played CDs.

I find myself thinking here as I drink my coffee, for now made by an electric coffee maker. I feel that all these technological evolutions made our daily activities far more practical and, above all, gave us the ability to do more activities in a shorter period of time. However, I also observe that many things have become “colder,” with a higher level of superficiality compared to the activities of past times, and all of this, from my point of view, ended up taking the pleasure out of many things.

Perhaps my reflection is somewhat the result of the nostalgic feeling that lives within me, caused by an unconscious difficulty in accepting this transition from the previous cultural model to the current one — a situation from which there is no escape. On the contrary, we increasingly need to adapt and seek various updates. Because every day something new appears, and what is new today may tomorrow already be obsolete and headed toward disuse.

The future is no longer distant or projected over the long term as it used to be. Now it exists in every second that passes on the clock, and with all this change the word “impossible” has lost the solidity of its meaning in the present times — because it is limited only to today, but no longer to tomorrow.

And what will tomorrow hold for us? Will it perhaps be the obsolescence of our ability to relate to one another?