If you handed your grandfather a smartphone when he was twenty, he might have thought it was a magic stone. Think about it — just a few generations ago, people wrote letters that took weeks to arrive. Now, we text someone halfway across the world and get a reply in seconds and still feel annoyed if it takes longer.
The way we live has changed so much. Every generation redefines what is “normal.” What was once revolutionary (like owning a colour TV) now feels like ancient history.
My father often narrates this incident from the late 1980s. My grandfather was passing by the television set and someone asked him to up the volume (there was no remote control). Myself who was three years old at the time ran towards the television and said to my grandfather "Let me do it, you don't know how to do it" and I increased the volume by pressing one of the buttons of the television set to everyone's astonishment in the room.
My grandfather was in his 60s when he first saw a TV while I saw it from my infancy. Similarly, my father came across touch screen smartphones in his 60s while my daughter has exposure to them from infancy. As we grow older it becomes more and more difficult to learn new things.
Technology is changing fast. Once upon a time, phones stayed in one corner of the house on a table or attached to the wall like loyal pets. Today, we carry our phones in our pockets like an extra limb — checking them first thing in the morning and sometimes even falling asleep with them still glowing in our hands. Technology has reshaped not just how we communicate, but how we think, feel, and even live.
In 1960s when my father was in his teens, he boarded a bus in Goa from his maternal uncle's place in Ponda to go back home in Siolim where my grandparents resided. The distance is around 50 kilometres and today it takes a little more than an hour if there is no traffic. In those days due to lack of bridges across rivers it used to take 3 hours. However, that day the bus broke down and my father reached 10 hours late with no communication as there were no phones at the time to inform about the situation. Imagine what would happen today if your family is waiting for you, there is no contact and you arrive at the destination 10 hours late. But what could my grandparents do in this situation in 1960s? Pray and worry are the only actions they could have taken back then.
Letters were the only mode of distant communication. Want to tell a friend you missed them? You wrote it down by hand, bought a stamp, mailed it, and waited days, sometimes weeks for a reply. Every envelope carried a little bit of mystery: good news? Bad news? Or may be a birthday card with money tucked inside! Even the news came at its own slow pace. Families sat around the radio or waited for the morning paper. Breaking news wasn't something you got instantly. Somehow, people seemed more present, more in the moment. If something big happened, it was talked about face-to-face in absence of social media. Entertainment was a shared experience too. One TV per house and a schedule you couldn’t control. If your favourite show aired at 8 PM on a Friday, you had to be sitting on the couch before that. No pausing, no rewinding. If you missed it? Tough luck. You had to wait for a rerun, if one ever came.
The digital age didn’t crash into our lives all at once. First came giant desktop computers followed by dial-up internet. If you lived through it, you remember the sound: that loud,
screechy robotic noise that played whenever you tried to connect to the internet. It was the soundtrack of patience because connecting took minutes, and any incoming phone call could kick you offline instantly. Early mobile phones weren’t sleek accessories. They were bulky, heavy, and mostly lived in briefcases. Owning a "cell phone" in the late 90s felt like having a superpower, even if all you could do was call and maybe play Snake game. Home computers were another story. If a house had a computer, it sat proudly in the living room like a prized piece of furniture. It wasn’t your computer; it was the computer — shared by the whole family, fought over by siblings, and treated like it might explode if you pressed the wrong button. But even in its awkward early stages, technology was thrilling. Suddenly, you could send emails instead of letters. You could chat with someone across the world in a chat room.
We didn’t realise it then, but the seeds of our always-online, always-available lives were being planted. Technology wasn’t just helping us; it was beginning to reshape us. It made the world feel smaller and faster. At first, the internet was just a tool — a cool new way to send emails, play games, maybe read some news. But then, slowly, something shifted. The internet stopped being just something you used and started becoming somewhere you lived.
It’s easy to look back and feel a little nostalgic for the old days. But the truth isn’t that simple. The digital age didn’t just steal from us it also gave us gifts we couldn’t have imagined back then. We gained convenience. Today, you can run a business from your bedroom. You can order groceries, learn a new language, or video-call a friend across the world. We gained opportunities. People once trapped by geography, money, or circumstances now have a fighting chance. Knowledge, once locked in expensive libraries, now lives free on the internet. We gained voices. Movements that would’ve been silenced before can now roar online. People once ignored finally have platforms.
But, of course, we lost things too. We lost patience, the ability to wait without anxiety. We lost some depth, trading long conversations for fast comments. And maybe most of all, we lost a little bit of presence. The ability to simply be where we are, with who we are, without constantly pulled in a thousand directions by buzzing, blinking devices. So, did we win or lose? The honest answer is: a little bit of both. The digital age didn’t destroy us or save us. It just changed us faster than we could fully understand. And now, it's up to us to figure out how to live with it, without letting it live for us.
The author resides in Margao and is an IT professional and author of the book titled “Memoirs of Europe: Difference in Living in Europe and India”.
