Who hit the fast forward button?

One of my favorite movies is "The Shawshank Redemption". It's a prison movie set in the first half of the 20th century. One of the main characters, Brooks Hatlen, has been incarcerated his entire adult life and is finally paroled when he's in his 70's. Marveling at how much things have changed in 50 years, he sends a postcard to his buddies back in prison and it contains this line, "The world went and got itself in a big d*** hurry!". I'm starting to feel this way myself. I haven't been in jail and I haven't been out of touch with the world for five decades. However, I am witnessing a world that was already moving really fast, speeding up to near warp speed. When I was kid, you actually had to walk over to the TV and turn a dial to change the channel. There were 4 channels to choose from... ABC, CBS, NBC and a local UHF channel. Kids shows were limited to Saturday mornings. If you missed your show, you had to wait a whole week to see it again. Now there are literally hundreds of channels beamed to my home via satellite. If you miss your show, it can be digitally recorded and viewed at your convenience. When I was in high school computers started appearing. They didn't do much and what they did do was activated by inserting a disk into a drive. We certainly didn'y carry computers around in our pockets. Now we have laptops and smart phones that allow us to access the internet instantly from anywhere in the world. I read yesterday that 900 million people use FaceBook. I heard somebody say that's 15% of the entire planet. I refuse to use FaceBook for reasons that would not interest you. Suffice it to say I will not be adding to FaceBook's totals in my lifetime. Now we have Twitter, Instant Messaging, Texting, and tons of other social media that I don't even know exist! The world is moving at breakneck speed and I have abandoned any thoughts of trying to keep up. The world has passed me by and all I can do is stand back and watch. I suppose this is the same way generations past felt when the telegraph, telephone, radio and television came along. I am looking forward to the day when I can tell my grandchildren that I am older than cell phones, iPods and the internet. I will have fun telling them of the days when I listened to music on something called a radio and played vinyl records on a turntable. I will tell them of the long forgotten item called a telephone book. Tell them of the days when everybody's phone number was in a book the size of a Christmas ham! Tell how the book was so big, short people could sit on it to see over their car's dashboard. It will be at that point a small child will disengage from his/her digital music device and smart phone for a moment and say, "Grandpa tell us about the good old days back in the 80's". Just call me Brooks. The world went and got itself in a big d*** hurry!