Kids These Days...

So, iOS7 has been released. I can proudly declare that, after a moment of thought, I know what it stands for. And...that's about it.
I know that it makes my phone's screen fade in and out in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. It makes my apps fly in and out like Yoda tanked up on Red Bull. Some things are different colours, some are different shapes, and iTunes is now even more of a pain to use than before.
But as for what it actually does for my phone's inner workings, I wouldn't have the foggiest. Soak it in Apple tech-juices? Something to do with nanotechnology? Reversed the polarity of the neutron flow??
Oh, how little we know about our world.

I'm not really what you'd consider to be a tech-head. Sure, I know my way around an iPhone, can solve most computer problems experienced by over-40s and I don't enter panic-mode when confronted with HTML, but by the standards of my generation, I'm not a technical whiz. What I do have is a curiosity regarding how things work.

I often imagine I'm explaining technology to a person from the middle-ages. Obviously time-travel shenanigans have ensued, and this very confused squire is wondering exactly how cars work.

"Simple!" I say, with a short burst of laughter that suggests I'm watching a kitten trying to inflict bodily harm upon its own reflection. "They have something inside them called an engine that drives the car along."
"But how does the engine work?" the squire replies.
The laughter dies on my lips. I hurriedly move on to an explanation of why he should never, ever, ever take YouTube comments seriously.

After all, cars are commonplace. There has never been a time, and there has rarely been a day in my life, that I have not traveled inside them. Yet I open the hood of my own automobile and it's like I'm staring into a warp-drive from Star Trek. Apart from making me feel thoroughly devoid of masculinity (as if the Star Trek metaphor didn't accomplish that already), I'm struck by how little I know about cars. Y'know, those things that are absolutely everywhere that we rely upon every single day.

The squire, who has not yet done me the decency of either tumbling back into the vortex that will take him home or having a shower, asks how my phone works.

"Simple," I reply, sipping my tea with an imperious air. "Electricity."
The squire frowns.
"Is that some form of dark sorcery?"
The mug freezes halfway to my lips. I think for a moment and realise that I have no better explanation.
"Yes," I say, warily nodding. "Sorcery indeed."

Then he'd teach me the motion to ward off the evil eye, and I'd teach him the fist bump.

But our hypothetical squire raises a valid point, and that's that we often don't have the slightest clue how the world around us functions. We are adept at taking technology for granted, as if it were handed down to us one day by the gods of Olympus as our eternal right.

Who here knows how a toaster works beyond 'it heats up'? How does a bulb produce light? Why have projectors and printers worldwide taken it upon themselves to be the bane of mankind?

Few people know, and even then it's mostly because it's their livelihood to know. So does this make us a race of ignorant, ungrateful toddlers who demand gadgets and do nothing but stomp our feet when they fail?

Well, not exactly. If you're reading this, and you're a human person (congratulations?), you have only a finite number of years to live. We can't possibly understand our entire world- there's just too much stuff. And more of this proverbial stuff is created every day. Imagine trying to learn the full names of everyone in the world, including correct pronunciation. Not only is there too much to learn, but people are constantly being born, so the learning never ends (printers and projectors are French names in this analogy, because obviously).

Technology is the same. This planet is so complex and brimming with information that one lifetime simply isn't enough to learn all of it. It's folly to even try.
And that's why it's okay to take technology for granted. Knowing that will allow you to bear the scorn of IT professionals who think their knowledge of SEO makes them somehow superior to other humans (just ask them how many pull-ups they can do. That usually shuts them up).

It's a big, scary, wonderful, incandescent, indescribable, mysterious, adjective-filled world, and you won't so much as find knowledge as it will smack you in the face. Especially if you're a frequent visitor to Wikipedia.

There's no grand moral to this tale, except perhaps that you can rest easy knowing that lots of intelligent people in white coats are working around the clock to bring you a USB with even more storage space.

No, that's a terrible moral.

Beware of gaps in the fabric of time?
People from the middle ages lacked a proper understanding of dental hygiene?
Have you tried turning it on and off??

Take your pick from any of those.
I might go and see if I can fix the wifi with some medieval curse words.