I was born in Korea in the early 1980s. I don’t have many memories from the 1980s, but I do remember that the 1988 Seoul Olympics were a big deal. After the Olympics, Korea started developing very fast. As a child, our family was financially secure because my dad owned his own business. I remember we had a big screen tv that was fat and heavy. I had a giant phone called a “city phone”(early mobile device that could make calls like a cellphone but could receive only small text messages as a beeper does.) in the late 1990s when I was in high school. Most people were still using pagers so students would line up in front of the public phone to listen to their voice mail during their breaks and then had to run back to class when the bell went off. I was lucky to have a city phone, so I did not have to deal with waiting in lines or carrying coins. That was my first true exposure to the benefits of technology.
I’m sure that everyone has a fond memory of choosing their background music and recording their voice for their pager. Listening to music on my Walkman, recording my favorite music from the radio and sometimes accidently recording the commercial too if I didn’t press the stop button in time; those were really fun memories from 1990s. Then, cell phones came about; it provided just black and white text messaging and telephone calls, but this eliminated the need for public phones and carrying around a lot of coins. At that time, we were just daydreaming about being able to look at each other’s face through the phone and thought it was something that can only happen in the movies. From flat screen TVs to touch screens, it is crazy to see how much has evolved in just the last 20 years. Now, we can even wear virtual reality goggles and experience ourselves being in a game or a video. We have cars that don’t need gas and can drive itself. Technology is developing so fast. Almost too fast actually, but of course there are many benefits from this. For example, you can see your family who are on the other side of the world without having to fly for hours and we can shop for anything online and have it delivered to our door the next day!
I draw pretty well with just a pencil but it takes hours to finish one person’s face. With this technology, application from your phone can turn your picture to drawing in a second and it looks awesome. Who wants to wait for hours sitting in front of me? Technology makes things so easy and efficient, but there are also negatives to all of this. Soon, there will be no traditional stores like shopping malls with actual people working in customer service positions. Everything will be replaced by huge corporations likes Microsoft where all purchases are made online. Kids are glued to their screens watching Youtube and playing E-sports instead of actually going outside and playing sports. How can we be so connected, but disconnected?