The Advancement of Technology

This morning I watched Apple's Back to the Mac keynote live (because I'm a nerd like that), and was very impressed with some of the new bold moves Apple is making with their OS, as well as some great improvements to their iLife suite. My fellow nerds can see everything talked about here.


I won't get into specifics, but Apple added a lot of really cool professional-looking effects to their iMovie program, and a friend of mine commented, "I wish they didn't make those available to everybody. I leaned how to make those in high school and we had to work really hard at it."

My immediate response was that this comment was selfish, but I can completely understand the frustration. Technology moves at an alarming rate, and all that cool stuff you bought over the years (last week?) is already obsolete. This is just a fact of life, and you can be in a constant state of sorrow about your 3rd Gen. iPod Touch you purchased a month ago, or you can appreciate what you have and get the most out of it.

Think about the video-editing process for example. The most basic free software can make some of the most professional-looking video incredibly easily. Those fancy effects that used to take hours to manually produce can now be done with a simple drag-and-drop. This can be frustrating for the seasoned video-editor who remembers all they went through when they were learning. But there's always somebody who had it worse than you did.

Before the age of computers, editors had to cut and splice things by literally cutting the film strip and taping it back together again, a process that could take days and days for a simple video. Talk to anybody who had to go through that, and they'll be amazed at what software can do these days. The difference between them is their attitude towards it. They can either be mad and complain that people don't appreciate video editing anymore, or they can be happy that this technology has inspired a whole new generation of amateur movie-makers.

This just furthers my philosophy that life is all about the attitude you have toward your everyday situations. You can be sad and envious about not having the latest technology, or you can appreciate what you have and be happy for the new generation that gets to use it.