ONCE UPON A TIME if you wanted to express yourself to another human being and bask in the feeling that you matter simply because your voice is being heard you had to go outside, walk up to someone, look him or her in the eye and speak your mind. Spending a little face-time with another of the species. You remember that, don't you?
Unfortunately, the little electronic toys that we all carry around today can offer you a quick fix of that same feeling of communing and connectedness while making no more of an effort than vegetating on the couch in your pajamas. But this is not new news. It seems like forever that people have been droning on about the potential for isolation and loss of social contact that's a byproduct of our digital existence.
About 100 years ago in the 1920s a guy named Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "the global village" to describe the effect that the exploding use of that high-tech invention "the radio" was having on mankind. At this point, is it even possible to remember what it was like before we all had microcomputers in our pockets? Do we even have any perspective on how we've changed?
Imagine if we could beam someone from the past forward to the present day. Say, someone like Benjamin Franklin, and it was you who happened to be standing next to him when he gets to flip through the channels on a TV for the very first time. Within a few minutes he would probably be learning other new acronyms like EMT, and ER.
Well, maybe that sounds a little too sci-fi and improbable. How about an example that's slightly more "now-ish".
In October of 1958, the famous TV reporter Edward R. Murrow delivered a speech to a room full of his peers in the television broadcasting industry entitled "Wires and Lights in A Box".
Therein he said:
"... Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps in color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, AND PAY LATER."
It's seems to be our folly that we so seldom question who we were and what we've become and wonder if, had we planned a deliberate future, that the end result would have been the same.
I leave it to you to decide if, why, or what alternate course of action might improve the world in which we live, but in any case, I just wanted you to know.