Looking back a few years ago, I remember when our academic department plunked an ungainly little hunk of electronic wizardry called an Apple computer on my desk and told us to go forth into the Promised Land. Apparently, we were expected to become more brilliant, less opinionated, more productive, and crank out a plethora of journal articles that no one would ever read or understand. This ugly little doodad probably had 54 MB or some such teensy capacity, which might have got you through a thank you note to grandma for sending you 20 bucks for your birthday.
The Curmudgeonly Professor is no expert on electronic media, or any other media, for that matter. But he has kept track of what has happened during the technological revolution in data and information transmission. Beginning with punch cards, card sorters, and huge rooms full of primitive computer tubes, and leading up to the current world-in-the-palm-of-your-hand society we live in today, the whole transition has come upon us in two or three decades. Children born in the past decade or so have no idea that everyone in history wasn't born with a Blackberry in their chubby little fists and a cell phone with which to text Mommy when it was time to be dried off.
The U.S. Postal Service was probably the first major institution to feel the impact of the communication revolution as the wave of faxes and then emails left the government's mail deliveries more and more limited to "junk"mail and bills, except for those still afraid of or angry at computers. Electronic bill paying, which is not only easier but infinitely more accurate than licking a bunch of stamps and taking your handwritten checks to the mail box, has wiped out another chunk of mail. The Postal Service, suffering with bleeding deficits, followed the reverse logic of defying the Laws of Supply and Demand by beginning a long series of rate hikes. Many of these hikes were, of course, inevitable as inflation and higher costs mandated them. But the hopes of gaining revenue and remaining solvent were more often dashed than not as higher postage rates drove more and more people to electronic information transmission. Higher postage, before the era of electronic transmission of newspapers, probably did as much as anything to drive down newspaper subscriptions as I canceled my subscriptions to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and several other papers which cheap postal rates had made possible to read. For over ten years I wrote a weekly economics column for a New York international investment service that I transmitted by the ancient method of Telex.
Now hand-held devices are ubiquitous, a word my granddaughters will appreciate and which they have, hopefully, already added to their vocabulary as members of the We Know What's What Society. Go to the grocery store and watch mommies with a brood of kiddies trying to wheel the cart with a yowling offspring while dangerously negotiating the corners while yapping on a cell phone. Sit in a waiting room and be pummeled with the personal affairs of those who find it necessary to convey the most dreary details of their personal lives to the public. Drive down the road and forget the pleas for sanity in driving by limiting and avoiding use of texting and cell phones as many drivers are glued to their little electronic goodies. Go to the movies and be annoyed with flashing lights of cell phones and texters. Apparently the first thing three year olds learn is how to move their thumbs in rapid-fire sequence to let the entire world know of their personal trials and tribulations. My recent visit to my old college campus revealed students simultaneously wired to iPods and either yapping on cell phones or texting or all three, or maybe even four or five, depending on their electronic degree of wizardry.
Not to mention the worlds of Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, email, and other information transmission methods. Students who don't have time to study apparently have plenty of time to Twitter, Tweet, write on people's walls, tag them in photos, post photos from their cell phones, keep track of their true love moment by moment, let mommy know second by second what they are doing and ask mommy what they should wear on a date tonight, vent their spleens, vote "like" for whatever they like, and, in general, spend a lot of unproductive time doing unproductive things.
The electronic world does have its pluses. I was reading an article about how texting has opened up the world for deaf people. I had never thought of this as a wonderful benefit as deaf people have a way to communicate. Constructive information does get transmitted. The best of Twitter entries and the best of blogs convey an enormous amount of helpful and constructive information, once you sort out the reliability factor and know who you can trust and who is just full of hot air. The sense of world community becomes ever more possible. I am continually amazed at the increasing numbers of foreign visitors to this blog from all over the world. There is something to be said about the benefits of "keeping in touch" as I reflect on the fact that when I first left for college in 1950 it took a week for my parents to get a letter from me saying we had arived safely in Laramie since we had no phone at home.
The main complaints about all this wonderful world seem to center on trivialization and on marginalizing daily life, on using electronic media to spread propaganda and misinformation more quickly and more widely than ever possible before, on the time wasted that could have been put to more productive uses, and on being "over-connected" in a way that robs us of our own independence and personal responsibility.
No matter how much the critics carp and no matter how much snobs look down their librarian reading glasses perched on the ends of their noses and vow their own anti-electronic-media purity, the world will never be the same again. The ability to shop for anything and everything for those with or without transportation; the ability to send warnings of real dangers and to communicate in times of critical need; the ability to ask Google any question one can think of; the ability to store an entire technical library in the palm of one's hand--social and economic historians will fill many tomes full of scientific evidence and tidbits about the ongoing electronic revolution. The capacity to accomplish much good, to convey critical information to masses of people, will accelerate as innovators find new ways to move beyond the powerful elementary questions like "What are you thinking" or some such that have fired social media like Twitter and Facebook.
So like it or not, we will not escape this revolution. But like all revolutions that evolve over time, tomorrow's social media and electronic information transmission methods will differ from those of today. Just as the Palm Pilot died a relatively quick and inglorious death, and faxes gave way to emails, and the Post Office continues to raise rates to try and bail itself out of a hole while digging itself in even deeper, and cell phones became multi-purpose electronic miracles, the chances are we will all be going around with earbuds in our ears, cell phones in our pockets and purses or on our ears, Blackberries and iPads and Nooks and Kindles and any one of dozens of other miracles of modern technology. I am just ticked off that I had to do my doctoral dissertation in 1963 on an IBM 650 computer using dozens of boxes of punch cards and that my wife had to retype my dissertation a half dozen times when some committee member told me to change something on page 10 which necessitated, of course, retyping the whole blasted thing. Such is life. We will all benefit when we are willing to take the best and most useful from today's technology and use these marvels in ways that benefit all of us and move away from trivializing and marginalizing and maybe, even, read a book. Imagine!
One thing about it, since this post is a tad longer than the 140 character limit on Twitter, I am guaranteed that no one will ever read it. But at least I had some practice writing again.
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