Members of the 125th Precinct pondering a technological question

So this past week was the last episode of the American remake of “Life on Mars“, a great show about Sam Tyler, a 21st police detective transplanted back to 1973.  The show, besides being part sci-fi/part police drama, was also quite capable of being tongue-in-cheek.

In one episode, Sam and his fellow squad members are faced with having to talk a despondent, suicidal man down from a ledge.  The man had lost all of his money after making a bad investment in what he thought would be a revolutionary technology – a portable phone, one that you could take with you if you left your home or office.  At which point, Ray, Sam’s mustachioed, sexist, pro-Nixon colleague turns and poses the question to his fellow, mostly like-minded cops:

“Who wants to carry around a phone?”

It didn’t take long for me to see the profoundness of the question.  Society’s attitudes towards technology have a tendency to change.  Sometimes that change takes place over a prolonged period of time (anyone have/or is a grandparent that finally broke down and bought their first computer?), sometimes it feels like it happened overnight.  When gas hit $4.00+ a gallon last year, I never saw so many people reconsider the fuel economy of their automobiles so quickly.

My own personal “about-face” occurred several years after the advent of the portable MP3 player (which I thought was redundant).  I had received an Apple iPod Nano as a birthday gift, but didn’t think I would use it much.  That is, until several months later when I had to drive twelve hours each way from New Jersey to North Carolina. I didn’t trust the radio stations to entertain me for the duration of the trip and I didn’t want the hassle of choosing and packing 20-50 CD’s – the Nano suddenly became a Godsend!  Later on, the introduction of Podcasts would further cement my change in opinion.

I could tell a similar personal tale about Twitter.  To that, too, am I now a convert.

So I ask you, what technology did you originally dismiss as useless or pointless that you now can no longer live without?  And what convinced you to change your mind?

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