1. The first cameras required you to stand still while the picture was being taken. More than one hundred years later, you need to call ‘stop’ and have everyone freeze while your camera application opens up.
2. The hip and cool thing to have in the 1950's and 60's was a transistor radio, with a tinny speaker, pushing out the hits of Dusty Springfield, Johnny Cash for all to hear. Now we’ve left the personal stereo era behind and are using our phones speakers to push out our achingly retro hip sounds… invariably of Dusty Springfield and Johnny Cash.
3. The expense of the telegraph meant that messages were kept short. If you go over 160 characters today, you’ll still get charged double.
4. At the start of any call, you’ll be shouting 'can you hear me?' and 'yes, I can hear you' while thinking isn’t it wonderful that we can use VoIP to call someone on a crackly line over the Atlantic ocean?
5. While your Butler served you breakfast, he would hand over a freshly printed copy of "The Daily Universal Register". Now you get the headlines from The Times pushed to your screen over breakfast through Google Reader.
6. Ever had the horror of being taken through a rack of slides of a relative's holiday pictures and praying for them to run out? Nowadays space isn't the issue and the hope is that the battery runs out before you have to look through over a Gigabyte of pictures of the Grand Canyon.
7. Fancy putting together a newsletter for your 12 friends so they can read about what you’ve been up to today? With pictures pasted in about what you can see, and your own words and thoughts? Sure the medium has changed slightly (to blogs/Twitter etc), but the principle (and, importantly, the number of readers) has stayed the same.
8. While your shoebox of personal pictures has turned into a digital archive [or perhaps not - I'm looking guiltily at my shoebox of 35mm and APS photos from 1990 to 2002 - Ed], you’re still carrying around a thousand pictures where you can't really remember who the strangers are in the picture and where it was taken.
9. Your little black address book still stays close to your heart, but it’s still a continuing challenge to keep it both up to date, and with a copy at home as well.
10. The important thing about any technology, be it the ink and quill, the telegraph or even the smartphone, is the people behind the tech, who you are communicating with. That hasn’t, and should never, change.
-- Ewan Spence, May 2008