Is it easier to communicate now than ever before?
With all the technological advancements made in the last several years, it seems as if the ability to communication has been greatly improved. And when you consider what’s transpired in the pre-boomer’s lifetime, it’s hard to argue against the belief that we’re far better off today than in the past.
Think back to when we were kids. A telephone came in any color you wanted as long as it was black, to paraphrase Henry Ford. Until after the war, lots of those living in my neighborhood didn’t have a phone. If someone needed to reach them in a hurry they had to call the corner drug store, and the proprietor sent one of the boys playing the pinball machine in the back room off to the recipient’s home. That person would drop what they were doing, rush to the store, and take the call in one of the several phone booths lining the wall of the store. Of course, the messenger always got a tip for their efforts.
My folks had a phone on a stand in a corner of the dinning room, which was used judiciously. It was a party line, with three other families sharing the same line, so when our phone was in use and there was a “click” on the line it was time to hang up. In the late ‘40s we got a private line, but I never used the home phone much, even in my teens. I preferred to use the phone booth at the drug store in order to some have some privacy. Besides, it cost only a nickel to make a call and talk as long as you wanted, until the booth steamed up from body heat or an adult wanted to make a call. This system seemed to work out pretty well for years to come.
- Image by zen via Flickr
It wasn’t until I entered the business world that I really became dependent on the telephone. Still, the phone was simply a convenience in my private life. Sure there were more phones around the house, in different colors and shapes, but the big part of my personal communications continued to take place on a one-on-one basis.
In the mid-eighties, after starting my own business, I spent a great deal of time traveling by car around Southern California. Someone suggested I could do a better job of staying in touch with people if I had a mobile phone. Once I submitted to this innocent enough sounding idea, I was sucked into being available at anytime to virtually anyone who wanted to talk with me; because after a brief time with a pager, I soon was carrying around a bulky cell phone everywhere I went. The phones have gotten smaller with more bells and whistles, but the concept of being on-call 24/7 remains the same.
Now, thanks to the computer/Internet boom, we’ve advanced from emails and text messaging and blogs to the next generation of social networking tools from Facebook to Twitter to Zimbio. And there will be new iterations of these as fast as the tech people can bring them to market. So don’t you yearn, at least once in a while, for the good old days when the most enjoyable communications were when two people got together — face-to-face, in the same room, with no interruptions — and just had a conversation?
The USA was on the verge of winning the Vietnam war. Our troops soundly defeated the enemy in the Tet Offensive except the generals forgot to tell the press. The press lost the war. Walter Conkite said the war was lost. Except we had a decisive victory. The Politicos didn’t the generals fight the war. We know who the dems will fight it us the American people. This is the sad state of affairs we have in this country.
Those old dial phones were cool. In those days we didn’t have call waiting. If you called a number it either rang and rang or it was busy or someone answered the phone. Those days were simpler. The houses were never locked at night. If went to see your buds you just walk in. I miss those days but at the same time thank God for the internet and computer.