I overheard two 60+ men the other day commiserating over “all that new fangled technology”, specifically on how it’s completely ruined communication with “people just spending all day staring at that boob tube”. Aside from the question of whether ‘boob tube’ can still refer to a television, I had a thought while I passer-by’d that conversation:
What IS the state of communication now? Really, from a meta-view, is Communication (yes, capital “C”) really in a worse place than it was in “the past”? In fact, when is this particular time we’re thinking about when we say “the past”? It’s not like we were all farmers sitting around candlelight and then BOOM suddenly we’re Facebooking our mobile phones to the internet.
No, the course of human communication has been one of constant quickening, continuous increase in pace. What did the telephone do to the conversation? What did the morse code do to the shipping world? What did the radio do to the newspaper? However old you are right now, you were born into a time when the technology you now look back on fondly was the cause of another technology’s demise.
So when people complain about the current state of communication, they’re really complaining about feeling out of touch with the people around them.
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