It's a "magical" world today

They're called Digital Natives -- the current generation of youngsters who have grown up in a world that has always had computers and the internet.

They text-message on their phones and have developed their own "shortcuts" for words and phrases that leave the rest of us wondering if they're speaking the same language.

They've revived the once-almost-dead art of diary writing with their blogs (the difference being that diaries were meant to be kept secret and blogs are meant for the entire world to read).

They're at ease surfing the net and assume that any question they have can be quickly answered in minutes with a few keystrokes, rather than the hours of laborious pouring through books that most of the rest of us had to do growing up.

Their children who aren't even potty trained yet know how to use a computer's mouse.

Digital Natives may not know how the technology works, any more than any of the rest of us "old timers," but they're at ease manipulating it.

Arthur C. Clarke, the visionary and science fiction writer, once wrote, many years ago, that "in the future, technology will become indistinguishable from magic." He's lived to see that prophecy largely come true.

Imagine, for just a moment, someone from the famous "greatest generation," the WWII era, suddenly being transported through time to today. That's my father's era, so it's not that far removed from modern times, but he'd see most of the modern world as pure magic.

In dad's day, at the time he was the same age as today's Digital Natives, not everyone even had a telephone in their house. Today, most people have one in their pocket.

Television was a novelty (it didn't catch on until the early '50s, about the time I was born) and the then-popular comic strip detective Dick Tracy had its lead character carrying around a science-fiction device with him, a watch that doubled as a video phone. Today videophones double as watches and you can view your favorite TV shows and breaking news on your cell.

An automobile was a mobile hunk of metal and if you talked to it usually you were cursing it for overheating. Today, you can carry on a conversation with your car. In fact, when I was growing up car manufacturers stressed horsepower when trying to sell their vehicles. Today, I see ads on TV for new cars that stress computing power ("it has an 80-gig hard drive and voice-activated phones and MP3 players").

In fact computer voice recognition systems have gotten so good in recent years that half the time when I call a company for information or tech support I get a computer that asks me questions and understands my answers (the other half of the time I get a guy with an Indian accent so thick I can barely understand him, but that's another issue entirely).

More and more computers utilize voice recognition systems and it won't be long before the keyboard and mouse interfaces we use today disappear in favor of "conversations" with your computer. Right now, most of my conversations begin with "you dirty son of a....", but in the near future we'll just "chat."

I grew up listening to music on vinyl records, but today's kids use CDs read by lasers for their music and aren't sure what a "record" is. But don't laugh kids, the next generation will utilize computer downloaded MP3 music entirely and won't know what a CD is.

I was born before the first transistor was developed (we used vacuum tubes to switch circuits) or the first laser, and a computer that couldn't do much more than multiply and divide took up entire floors of large buildings. When I was the age of today's Digital Natives the Apollo program put a man on the moon using less computing power than my watch has (don't even try and explain to a kid today what a slide rule is).

Today, I can't go through a checkout lane at the supermarket without a laser checking the price and tiny chips smaller than my thumbnail with millions of transistors on them reading that information and telling me how much I owe the store -- and then deducting it automatically from my bank account.

When I was growing up, if your TV went bad, you opened up the back, pulled out a few tubes (my kids have no idea what I'm talking about), went down to the grocery store, plugged them into a tube tester, bought the replacements for the bad tubes, then went home and fixed the set. Today, you either replace the mother board or just toss the entire TV in the trash and buy another.

Today, my TV informs me when I need a new filter or other replaceable component, and you can buy refrigerators that tell you when you're running low on milk.

I played outside as a kid -- and scraped my knees more than once, even broke a few bones. Today's Digital Natives play in virtual worlds where the worst danger they face is pulling a muscle in their hand while using the game controllers.

When I was growing up robots were something purely in the realm of science fiction and usually some hulking piece of menacing metal out to enslave the world. My grandkids are asking today for robot dogs to play with (which have the advantage that they don't chew on your slippers, but they do use up a lot of batteries). The dogs bark, like to be petted, and play with the grandkids as if they were perpetual puppies.

It's all magic.

This Christmas, my wife and I both got a bunch of hi-tech "toys" from Santa Claus. We've spent the last week struggling with manuals, tech support calls and just, in general, trying to figure out how to make the things do what we want them to do. My kids, Digital Natives all, just laugh at us, sit down to show us how to make the toys work, and all their instructions begin with, "really, it's easy, you just...", at which point I quickly become lost in a terminology I don't understand but which is second nature to them. They've never known a world without software.

If Clarke is right, and the current trends continue, the next generation won't be called Digital Natives, they'll simply be referred to as Magicians.