Hey everyone!  I’m posting this on behalf of Sarah Cotton, our Keeper of Contemporary Collecting:-

Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums has recently teamed up with researchers at Northumbria University to encourage new thinking and comment around important subjects, such as Britishness, migration, and culture in an industrial region.

Each week, for eight weeks, we’ll be blogging about a museum object and posing a question for you to respond to.  Please help us get the discussion going by adding your comments below, whatever comes to mind.  Later in the summer, your comments may be fed into a live debate where we hope you’ll have the opportunity to join academics and curators discussing the most popular topic.

The theme for this week is “Cultural history of technology” which I’ve chosen to represent with this 2010 ipad from our collection.

The lead designer for the ipad is Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of Design at Apple who studied at Newcastle Polytechnic in the 1980s.  The ipad is used by so many, for so many different reasons.  This piece of technology, along with smartphones, has had an enormous impact on the way people do things and communicate with each other in their personal and working lives.

My question is:

Has there ever been a period of time where technological advancement has had such a radical impact on every day life?