This isn’t necessarily exclusively related to Advertising, but society in general. The question I pose: What came first? Technology or this need for instant gratification?
I was thinking about this topic on my bus ride back to Boston from NYC while doing business-like things on my new phone, which happens to be very Smart. My phone is the HTC Fuze, which (trying to not seem too much like a shill) has a touchscreen along with a million other features. I’ll touch on these aspects later, but first let’s talk about touchscreens.
My love of touchscreens spawned from when I worked in fast food service and we inputted all orders on a touchscreen terminal. Then I saw all the kids I taught at my summer job with their new Nintendo DS portable gaming consoles, which also had touchscreens. From that point on I wanted a touchscreen laptop because I figured it’d be awesome to do design stuff on (I settled on a tablet). And three years later I have arguably the most advanced phone on the market.
The Nintendo DS and HTC Fuze with their respective styluses
(Yes, I used to play Pokemon)
Where was I going with this? Oh yes, the touchscreen (isn’t it ironic how in a post titled ‘Instant Gratification,’ it took four paragraphs to get to the point?). The phone I had before this had actual buttons for menu navigation! That seems like such a foreign concept to me now, but I had that phone for three years. You know those phones are, you have to use arrow buttons to move up and down, and you’re only limited to where the arrows can go. With all this new touchscreen technology popping up everywhere (iPods, iPhones, GPS units, phones, computers, etc.), it’s becoming so much easier to get exactly what you want. One of these days, we’ll forget what it was like to have to use a computer mouse to move the pointer. In fact, maybe the pointer will become obsolete because you have an actual pointer you can use (which is very ironically, digital).
So back to my original question. Is technology fueling our desire to have instant gratification (since all the things we didn’t think possible a decade ago are now commonplace)? Or is it that we have to develop newer and better, faster, gratifying ways to implement technology because that’s how we live in the modern world?
Chicken or the egg?
