The Late Adopters

Was 2013 a “lost year for technology?,” as an article in Quartz recently proposed? Hardly. Yet I can understand, to some extent, both why there’s a growing ennui with tech among some observers, and why stating that overly simply angered other technology enthusiasts. It’s not necessarily due to a bored or cynical tech press that this feeling arises. It’s just that there’s this sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Technology caught mid-breath, as it were.

2013 wasn’t so much of a lost year for technology, but a transitional one.

A Level Playing Field

“The first week I had this new iPhone, I wanted to throw it across the room,” my stepmother told me during my parents’ annual holiday visit. She then added that, after a week of struggling, she learned how to use the phone, and was now enamored of the thing.

Clearly, my aging parents are what the industry would call late adopters. They are not particularly tech-savvy. They barely manage email. They don’t use Facebook. But they’re thrilled to now own a device where they can not only accomplish a variety of basic computing tasks – email, web surfing, navigation – but excel at them.

For some, that passing comment about technology’s frustrations would annoy. I imagine teenagers rolling their eyes at the complaints of the “olds” like these – those who are embarrassingly and annoyingly behind. Their delay to adapt to the ever-quickening changes in computing had for years placed them in a different class of online citizenry. While everyone else was liking and commenting on photo albums, they were getting an email or physical prints via the postal service. As the world began learning to speak their queries to Google and Siri, they were sitting at dilapidated, creaking Windows desktops, clicking keys and printing out Mapquest maps for upcoming trips.

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