Technology and the Individual

Technology has earned the sobriquet of The Great Enabler.  Right from the ancient invention of the wheel to the soon-to-come-of-age self driving automobile technology, the homo sapien has committed himself to ameliorating his living standards by hatching schemes to laze through his lifespan.  Quite enabling, what!  

First, let me profess, lest you think that I scorn any and every scientific advancement, that being a pupil of science myself, I have undertaken many an endeavor toward becoming a positive contributor in this area.  Being a man of science, however, does not automatically translate into being adept at all things technology.  Case in point, our new television.

In the earlier part of the previous decade, I had spent an entire semester in engineering college assimilating the contents of a magnificent tome - "Monochrome And Colour Television", meticulously penned by R. R. Gulati.  By the end of the semester, I and every other kid in my class would claim to be an authority in TV concepts like video signal transmission, vertical and horizontal sync, vestigial sideband transmission, NTSC and PAL coders, etc.  What was interesting though, was that I used the exact same textbook my mother had used when she had studied the subject during her engineering college days.  As such, one could hazard a conjecture that television technology had not evolved much in the aforesaid time-span.  In the last 20 or so years, however, television technology (and every other technology, for that matter) has seen alacritous advancement.  

We set up our shiny new LG 55" 4K UHD Smart TV yesterday.  During this exercise, I found that the lessons gleaned from R. R. Gulati's volume failed to come to my assistance.  For instance, I learned that my little homemade antenna made using paper clips, while quite effective, is now irrelevant in the face of myriad web-based video on-demand apps designed to cater to the whims of the impatient human brain.  Learning-curve, schmearning-curve; at least so far, between the Smart TV and myself, the former is the Smarter entity.