Walking to work this week I realized that at some point the sight of people walking and using miniature mobile computers has ceased to be novel. This change to my understanding of normality passed without note, which suggests to me that we are not at the beginning of a technological revolution, but instead are in the advanced stage of an old and now comfortable relationship with gadgets, and that any new “revolution” in mobile computing, if any, is still in the future. The previous revolution happened so long ago that most people that use this technology can’t even remember it (if they were even alive).

Think about it. The truly groundbreaking achievements are (rightfully so) always the ones that get the most notice, which each subsequent refinement or improvement garnering a little less surprise. The first time I saw a home computer I was floored. It was a Commodore 64, and could kinda sorta do things like write a letter, provided you sprung for a disk drive and a printer. As these computers got faster and smaller I actually got less excited as the devices themselves get more amazing. This is due to the fact that the basic context remains the same, so each subsequent subrevolution – laptops, DVD drives, wi-fi – is a mere augmentation. Added to this is the fact that as a device becomes more ubiquitous – and thus more important to our culture – it garners less attention, or at the very least attention shifts to the periphery.

I remember the first mobile phone I ever saw – a gigantic car phone my dad brought home from work when I was in middle school. It was heavy and clumsy and yet reeked of the future. I remember fairly well the first handheld cellular phone a few years later. Bluetooth headsets were odd for a second or two but I quickly got used to people talking to themselves on the street. I can’t even remember what year I started seeing cameras and email on phones. And the fact that pretty much everybody I know has a multifunctional computer/phone/library/stereo/camera/communicator (what Neal Stephenson might call a jeejah) at their constant beck and call, for less, I’m sure, than the cost of that original carphone I saw in middle school– that somehow crept up on me.

This is currently happening with digital cameras. It is happening with internet applications. It is happening with wireless connectivity. It is happening with all media. Between ten and twenty years ago most of this stuff was brought into the market for the first time, with a lot of hooplah, even though at the time most of it was largely useless. And now that we’ve gone through the laborious process of refining and debugging and working out how to use all of these magical devices, all of this revolutionary stuff has become expected, before we’ve really even seen what it can do. It’s like that “Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy” video. We’ve been sold the future for two decades, and now that it’s here, we are unimpressed.