Your Head Trucker is one of the few people now living outside of a nursing home who has actually sent a telegram for ordinary communication - ten words for $1.50 in 1966. SRSLY.
Stephen Heiner, a recovering Blackberrier, on the plague of eternal uplinkedness (honk to Andrew Sullivan):
As this breakthrough happened, I realized something deeper about the way we use phones – not just the smart ones: we are their slaves. We jump whenever they call because we never, ever turn them off. They only get turned off if we run out of battery life, and even then we become desperate for a charger and can think of little else until our depleted child has the charging indicator safely blinking and is serenely drinking its electronic milk.What I Say: It's truly astonishing to consider how quickly and vastly the Internet has changed our lives in what seems to me like a rather short time. When I was finishing college at the turn of the 70's/80's, computers were still largely in the commercial-use-only phase. All big companies and most small ones by that time were sending you computerized bills every month, and I do recall that by my senior year the library at my university had supplemented the card catalog - gee, I miss those - with an electronic one. Which actually had, wonder of wonders, not a keyboard but a touch-screen display (black screen and amber characters, no pictures, no Windows). Which of course was promptly covered with every kind of greasy fingerprint imaginable and stayed that way.
We have allowed ourselves to become 24/7 radio beacons. We are always on. Always ready to transmit or receive. There is a nervous habit that the younger generation has of checking their cell phones every 90 seconds or so. Just watch them. They didn’t hear a text message notification, but they are checking their phones just in case. And who knows, one might feel the urge to send a text message because heck, it’s been 30 seconds since one was sent. Watch people in airports, or in the auto repair shop, or on a university campus. There is a constant need to check to see if they are still plugged in. It is a nervous tic that they don’t even know is a tic.
In previous times, when we were more tied to place and limits as a society, people were reached at a specific location. Letters came to homes. Telegrams came to homes. Phone calls were placed…to homes. The cell phone, the harbinger of the always-on internet society, unhooked the anchor of place from communication. And when communication is not limited, is not circumscribed, it becomes unlimited and tyrannous. . . .
While people always cite “emergencies,” more often than not the singular reason that a cell phone exists in their lives is to give them a crutch to prevent them from being alone with themselves, their thoughts, and their fellow human beings. Going to the gym? Call a friend. Running an errand? Send a text. Eating something interesting? Take a picture and show the world on Facebook. We are incapable of living outside the virtual cloud that surrounds us. We can only fully live if we are constantly connected.
Or we can turn it off, put ourselves back in control of the machine, and take back the solitude and dreamy quiet of our thoughts: the beginnings of a recollection that lends itself to prayer and conversation.
But even though the very first PC's had just come on the market by the beginning of the decade, if I remember rightly, nobody but a very few intensely passionate fans of technology ("geek" had yet to enter the lexicon as a term for those guys) had them. Pocket calculators, yes (from about 1975), but PC's, no. For one thing, they were hideously expensive, maybe the equivalent of two to three thousand dollars now. For another, to use them you had to learn a whole programming language, like Basic. But even if you had the dough to invest in one, and the many long hours of solitary study to be able to program it, my thought always was, just what the hell would you do with it once you had it?
Continued after the jump . . . .
