Communication and isolation
Sept 2, 2009 9:59:50 GMT
Post by Deleted on Sept 2, 2009 9:59:50 GMT
Does the geographical distance of family and friends matter a lot to you? In this century, the telephone costs almost nothing, Skype even less, there are webcams, e-mail, MSN Messenger… And when you need to travel, it isn’t all that expensive compared to previous decades. There are airports everywhere and commercial routes that nobody would have dreamed of even 20 years ago. No one is isolated anymore.
When I was young, half of the family lived across an immense and stormy ocean, and our contact consisted of letters on ultra thin almost transparent paper which might take 5 or 10 days to arrive at destination. The telephone was out of the question, because not only was the cost outrageous, but none of the French family even had a telephone (France had dropped to something like 60th in the world for telephones by the mid-1970’s when President Giscard finally decided to do something about it and brought it up to the top 5.).
There was not a sense of isolation, however, just the knowledge that exchanges took time, and it was not a problem. Taking an airplane to Europe was also too expensive when I was little, so we took the ship – about 16 hours of train from home to New York and then an ocean crossing that lasted 5 ½ days, not to mention about 3 years of family savings to be able to pay for the trip.
So I guess that this new world of communication makes me feel old, even if I have adapted to it. I am still dumbfounded to see people pulling out their telephones the moment an airplane lands to hear them announce important things like “the flight just landed; I am still in the airplane.” Are they the ones who just can’t wait to make the announcement, or is the people they are calling who demanded this information the moment it was available? And what does it change about their lives? I still enjoy writing letters and sending postcards that will take the better part of a week to arrive. After all, I can send an e-mail this very moment to say that I have just arrived in Buenos Aires or Beijing, but what proof do I have?
I think that I am the one who is isolated now, because I don’t feel that I fit into this world of instant communication. I like to think about things and talk about them later.
When I was young, half of the family lived across an immense and stormy ocean, and our contact consisted of letters on ultra thin almost transparent paper which might take 5 or 10 days to arrive at destination. The telephone was out of the question, because not only was the cost outrageous, but none of the French family even had a telephone (France had dropped to something like 60th in the world for telephones by the mid-1970’s when President Giscard finally decided to do something about it and brought it up to the top 5.).
There was not a sense of isolation, however, just the knowledge that exchanges took time, and it was not a problem. Taking an airplane to Europe was also too expensive when I was little, so we took the ship – about 16 hours of train from home to New York and then an ocean crossing that lasted 5 ½ days, not to mention about 3 years of family savings to be able to pay for the trip.
So I guess that this new world of communication makes me feel old, even if I have adapted to it. I am still dumbfounded to see people pulling out their telephones the moment an airplane lands to hear them announce important things like “the flight just landed; I am still in the airplane.” Are they the ones who just can’t wait to make the announcement, or is the people they are calling who demanded this information the moment it was available? And what does it change about their lives? I still enjoy writing letters and sending postcards that will take the better part of a week to arrive. After all, I can send an e-mail this very moment to say that I have just arrived in Buenos Aires or Beijing, but what proof do I have?
I think that I am the one who is isolated now, because I don’t feel that I fit into this world of instant communication. I like to think about things and talk about them later.
