My father thinks that, due to the 'in your face' nature of technology these days, the next generation will resist technology, similar to the outlash against war in the 60s. I don't know about that (do you have an opinion?) but I see where that's coming from. My smart phone gives me incredible anxiety. It lags, it freezes, its never connected to the network, but worse -- I get emails about work all the time, I get ~5 telemarketer calls a day since the snapchat incident, and I am super unproductive when I pull out my phone during every idle moment to scroll through reddit/HN/twitter, pick your poison. And its, mostly, meaningless. At my university, people on the bus are nose deep in there iPhones at all times. At all times. I don't know if people used to talk on the bus, but they don't anymore. It freaks me out a bit, and I'm sick of it.
Do you remember the golden age of the moto razr 3? Not the droid razr, the flip phone. I still have mine, and I am considering going to verizon and canceling my data plan, to switch to the basic t9 flip phone (that just worked). Am I crazy? I know a lot of you out there want to, or have already deleted your facebook etc, so where is this all going? Could you revert to a simpler time without data plans?
Finally, I am a computer programmer by profession. Those of you like me will know, writing great software is damn near impossible. I think that is why I am skeptical of so much of this, because behind the scenes, I have witnessed first hand the madness that is a software project. (Do other compsci people feel this way?) Anyway, there is a ton of great, unobtrusive technology that we don't even think about, because it just works. See: digital watch, haha. I think that stuff will be around forever. But as a society, are we going to move past this 'social media' frenzy? Or are we going to get to the point where google glass is embedded in our heads, we will get advertisements in our sleep, and mentally reference wolfram alpha for every math problem?
cheers.