Yeah, Right. Like That's Gonna Happen.

When do you abandon the past? Seriously.

Advances in technology are making so many skills obsolete, when do we embrace the new and cast out the old?

Take photography, for instance. Digital camera technology is advancing at a most rapid rate. Digital image processing, even faster. So, what of film processing skills? I know for a fact that as beautiful as my digital pictures are, they pale in comparison to a well crafted film based image. And yet, the market will dictate that film photography will cease to exist for most of us entirely, or at least become so prohibitively expensive that few will maintain the necessary skills.
This is the way of things, though.
As an example, how many people know how to create a daguerreotype (or even know what the hell it is!)? Ansel Adams, one of the best film guys ever, acknowledged that digital photography was the 'wave of the future' years before his death in 1984. Still, as I look at the funny flat black areas on my digital prints or the solid whites of the clouds, I recall that yes, there was detail I could see in real life that exists not in the digital world.

Digital music has replaced analog recording pretty much completely. I was in a recording studio a couple of years ago. In the technicians' booth there was a huge mixing board, easily six feet wide and three feet deep, covered with switches, dials and sliders. Sitting on top of the mixing board, right in the middle, was a laptop. The laptop made everything else in the room obsolete. No audio tape on slow turning reels. The mixing board would have been gone, as well, but it cost too much to remove it. And yet some folks claim they can tell the difference between digital and analog sound. No, not by the lack of hiss, clicks and pops, but in sound quality; a richness born of overtones and harmonics and the sympathetic responses of our surroundings to frequencies that we cannot hear directly, but which are captured in analog recordings and rejected as noise in the digital world. And what about the guy I saw on the tube who could identify music by looking at the light reflecting from the grooves of a vinyl record? (For those of you under 25, a vinyl record is like a big, very flat, black pancake, which when played on a 'record player' would yield a sort of 'music') How is that guy gonna earn a living now?
Of course, complete digital files are better than the MP3 files of which we are so fond.
Still, I am willing to endure the clipping inherent in these to have thousands of my own tunes available and oh so convenient on that long airline flight, or to cover the yapping of my neighbors wiener dogs while I work in the yard.
How many kids will never pick up a real guitar because they can play Guitar Hero right now?

If you were born within the last twenty years, you may never know what you missed, and you just might not care.

I saw a movie, THX 1138, released in 1971. It depicted a future in which people lived in relative isolation, communicated (and 'hooked up') via video screens while eating prepackaged meals. They were monitored 24/7, and reality was tailored for them to suit the purposes of the controlling 'powers that were'. I remember thinking 'Yeah, right. Like that's gonna happen'

Hang on!