The new Eloi

The above shows the tail-end of a Facebook conversation I had with my 10 year-old nephew, Jorge, yesterday. He's on holiday and online...non stop. I was struck by the sheer joy expressed in his post.

In the comments you can't see, I told him that both Facebook and Instagram are (in the general scheme of things) new-ish and there was a time when not only did they not exist, but the internet was a flight of fancy too. I then directed him to my last blog post, Litmus for the human condition, which is about the end of the telegram. What you see is his response.

Having posted this morning, as promised, a break-neck bullet-point list of communications milestones and links to Google+ pages of pictures of telegrams, IBM Mainframes, Morse code alphabets, the first PC's, Macs and mobile phones, I suddenly felt very old indeed.

It was my Morlock moment to his Eloi and it worried me.

It made me wonder how much of how-we-got-to-where-we are-in-this-digital-age, kids in general are being taught. It's great that they're so tech-literate but I think they also need to know where it came from, because as we know, everything is connected in some way and the future is very often found in the past.

I keep thinking about aliens, Jeff Goldblum and Morse code.