This an actual speech I gave at my job site Toastmasters International Club, this is my last speech submission. Enjoy it...
I belong to the generation X. This is an approximate of dates, but people that born between 1965-1980 belong to this generation. We are preceded by the Baby Boomers generation and followed by the millennials. There is a lot to be said about the differences between generations and is a great topic but I can be talking about it for hours. I decided to talk about how me as part of generation X have survived to all the “progress” I have witness.
I belong to the generation X. This is an approximate of dates, but people that born between 1965-1980 belong to this generation. We are preceded by the Baby Boomers generation and followed by the millennials. There is a lot to be said about the differences between generations and is a great topic but I can be talking about it for hours. I decided to talk about how me as part of generation X have survived to all the “progress” I have witness.
I feel very fortunate of being able to experience all these changes, I had lived the original ways of doing things and the new ways. Not everybody can say that.
There is a lot of examples of this progress but I will mention few in different areas like communication, technology, and transportation.
Let’s start with communication. I used the rotary phone, yes those ones with a circular arrangement of digits and a finger wheel that help you to dial the destination number. If you dial the incorrect number you have to hang up and start over. The only rotary phone version my kids saw was the Fisher Price version.
Then the dial pulse tone telephone started to replace the rotary ones, they were fancier. You just pushed the digit buttons. In my house there was only one phone and it was not wireless, not yet invented. If you the phone rang and you were in the last room of the house you had to run to pick up the phone, we were more active those days. Also there was not caller id, we were braver those days, we had to answer the phone without knowing who was calling. In addition to bravery we developed patience, there was no call waiting either. If your sister was in the phone for hours and you called home from a pay phone booth (almost extinct), then there were no way to contact anyone and you have to listen to the annoying busy signal with patience and try multiple times.
Before the cell phone we had the great invention of pagers. I had one at my first job. I was on call 24/7. With this gadget you had to call a service company to send messages, give the unit number and message. The person who receive it will be beep in their device and if the message was to call back to someone they had to get access to a landline phone to get in contact.
Our salvation was created, cell phones. They have changed our communication and our lifestyles in a great way. At the beginning they were big and they started to shrink with more flat and lighter models they now are being enlarged because of the added functionality.
Our cell phones are our lives. If I cannot find my cell phone I can easily say I cannot find my life and you will understand: Our agendas, emails, texts, sons schedules, addresses and GPS system, my reservations, Google, google assistant, the great Siri. Everything is there.
Technology in general have changed so much in a very short time period that sometimes it feels it was a dream. Before internet and google, our general knowledge dwelled in old encyclopedias and textbooks that you have to dig in order to finish a school paper or project. We used to have dictionaries, we knew how to use a dictionary and the importance of knowing the alphabet. I don’t see those skills needed to be developed these days. Cursive is a different language, it was retired of the curriculum. My kids asked me sometimes: “Mommy how did you survive school without internet?”. I found it as easy but now I feel like a genius.
Now with the cars/trucks without drivers and tasks done by robots already in place it makes me think what is going to be left to us. What skills where our brains need to be used will be left to us?
With all this “progress” we are failing in having good communication even though we have now more channels available, like texting, emails, social media, cell phones. We sometimes take advantage of these technologies to affect communication:
- Texting instead of Talking
- Caller Id when we don’t want to talk with someone or face situations
Everybody is now in their phones everywhere, medical offices, in the lines in supermarket, bank, post office. This is promoting less interaction.
We have to be cautious with all this “progress”, because I feel we are losing the “human” part of human beings.
It is scary for me, a little. But we can protect what we have accomplished never abandoning our basic skills that make us the thinking specie.
Thank you for reading!
-Vane