Landrew’s Take on Technology

Sometimes, when I’m watching television, I think, “Man, this is so great that I don’t need to stand at all in order to do this! I wonder what it was like to watch television before chairs were invented.” Then I feel better when I remember that chairs were invented before television. But this doesn’t mean that chairs weren’t changed by technology, by which I mean, chairs were changed by technology!

One thing is that there are less stools around. Think about it: there’s no front or back to a stool, so you don’t know which way to sit on it! With technology being so advanced that you need to pay attention to it all the time, a stool would be dangerous. If there were a bunch of stools around a television, you might sit down with your back to the screen. Then you would still hear the funny stuff that people say, but you might miss it when someone makes a funny face, or when the joke is that someone falls down. It was like this in school too! In subjects that were hard and boring, like math, there were chairs so you would pay attention. But in subjects that were fun and easy and didn’t mean anything, there were stools, like in art class.

Another thing is that chairs have more cushions than before. A long time ago, it was dangerous to get comfortable so chairs weren’t as soft as they are now. The danger came from the fact that, to keep things from getting too boring, someone could randomly yell, “Draw!” and everyone would have to jump up and shoot old-timey guns at each other. This has been replaced by action-packed television shows that don’t require getting up fast, so chairs are softer.

But television isn’t the only kind of technology that has affected what we sit on. Office technology has been big for chair history too! A long time ago, when people just wrote stuff on paper and then sent it out using mail or trained eagles, chairs at desks didn’t have to move at all. Now, with so much stuff on desks, like a computer, a printer, a fax and speakers, desks have gotten bigger and you can’t reach everything from one place. This is where the rolling chair comes from. When there’s so much technology that we need to build desks that have really high shelves to put it all on, they might invent rocket chairs, or if people starting keeping their office stuff in several different rooms because they have so much of it, chairs would need to teleport.

If you look at pictures of old chairs and pictures of new chairs, you might think, “what are chairs going to look like in the future?” That’s just the thing: the chairs of tomorrow will probably look sort of the same. There will always be chair artists and chair scientists trying to make the coolest-looking and most comfortable chairs possible, but there will always have to be a place for your butt and a place for your back. (Unless technology is invented that makes it so people can get rid of their butt and their back. If that happens, chairs could look like anything!)