8 Dying Technologies

   You might know that Beloit College publishes its Mindset List annually. This is a list that reminds us that incoming first-year students at Beloit, and the rest of our nation's colleges, have a very different set of life experiences than older people may realize.  In other words, readers of the Mindset List get a yearly reminder they are getting older.
   Some of the Mindset List addresses technology changes. That's understandable. Technology changes rapidly, so the 8-track tapes of yesteryear are essentially unknown to today's college students.
   Reading the May, 2014 issue of MaximumPC, I was reminded of the Mindset List because there's a brief article on eight dying technologies.  The author suggests that the listed items are so out of favor with younger users that they are doomed to extinction.  They are, of course, items that many of us have used over the years.  But times change and new habits, built on new possibilities, evolve.  This list perfectly illustrates our evolving culture.

1. Travel Maps: Always a challenge to open them in a car and then refold them correctly. Useful for travel, but not as useful as a GPS navigation system to go from here to there.  And simply put, younger drivers/riders just don't use them.
2. GPS Device: Maps (see #1) were in part doomed by the GPS device. But that stand-alone device has quickly given way to assorted phone apps. My personal navigation app favorites: MapQuest and Scout.
3. Wired Internet: Though not likely to be truly extinct anytime soon, it is true that the generation currently coming of age is a wireless generation. A wired connection seems pretty old fashioned to most of them.
4. Answering Machine: You're just not very likely to find this device on the nightstand of a twenty-something.  The truth is, you're not all that likely to find that group of people making calls or leaving voice messages. Texting, tweeting and posting have largely supplanted voice-based communications.
5. Alarm Clock: Even I don't use an alarm clock, and no one will mistake me for a millennial or a gen-exer. I just use my phone's app.
6. CDs: As the article in Maximum PC states, vinyl may be coming back, but CDs will not.  If you're listening to digital music files, CDs are now the least convenient way to listen. (But they have best chance of surviving intact over time, so they may continue to exist as a back-up solution.)
7. Compact camera: We call them phones, but for most people, their functionality as a camera is very important.  Why carry a second camera that does pretty much the same thing as your phone's camera?  More avid photographers know that the phone's camera is not going to make a good DSLR obsolete anytime soon, but that small digital point and shoot will quickly become a thing of the past.
8. Land lines: Why pay twice for phone service? Cell phones are on their way to becoming a pervasive technology, so given the presence of a cell phone (and cell phone bill) in your life, do you need a land line too?  Twenty-somethings definitely think not.

Old School: Technologies evolve though memories persist.

    Technologies change, and as they do, new ways of doing things emerge.  Through history, my guess is that younger people have generally pushed these changes of habits forward.  That certainly seems to be the case in these first decades of the 21st century.