Change happens slowly, especially when you’re sitting around waiting for it.
Nevertheless, some things seem to be changing so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up. When it comes to communication these days, we probably all have our favourite methods. But whether it’s face-to-face, or online, the need to share information seems to have shifted gear exponentially. And it just seems to be getting faster.
The people who came before us, our ancestors, were the instigators of this change. They had a far more limited and restricted audience for their voices, and they wanted progress. They wanted news. But news travelled slowly. R e a l l y slowly. A couple of centuries ago the Americans might have though the new Pony Express was a quick way to get a letter delivered. These days you can leave the horse in the paddock and check into The Cloud for all your information.
Humans have mastered a vast array of communicaton styles over the centuries. As a Writer, my love of language needs no fanfare. I might be listening to spoken word at a poetry reading, or losing myself in the latest novel. (Yes, some of us still do read those strange papery things called books.) I’ve embraced the move into the e-world, albeit grudgingly at first. But a word is a word, however it’s transmitted. The joy for me is in the language, however it’s delivered.
Across our multi-lingual world we’re chattering on an almost constant basis these days, in one form or another. But I often speculate on lost time as we’re inundated with this endless stream of banter. Twitter, sms, Facebook, WhatsApp, e-mails, ipods, live streaming, catch-up TV, YouTube. So many things to check. Life feels busy and out of control sometimes, and maybe, just maybe, all this information sharing is becoming too much?
We’ve come a long way since we used smoke signals across the valley. I mean, look at the options as they became available. There’s yodelling, for instance. No, I’m not kidding. According to Wikipedia the earliest record of a yodel is in 1545, so if you had the vocal register, and needed to round up your goats in the Central Alps, or communicate with a nearby Alpine village, then voilà. It was your tool of choice.
Historically, letters were written and delivered by hand, from one household to another. Plenty of clandestine affairs would have been facilitated by a lady’s maid doing a dash across town with a perfumed notelet. Or by a stableboy running across the fields clutching a reply, filled with fervent promises and declarations. Romantic certainly, but I imagine there’d be lots of waiting and pacing. No wonder people wanted to marry young.
When the postal system emerged in the 1700’s, household staff everywhere must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. Less running, and more scrubbing. (Well, perhaps not that much relief then.) Mind you, a horse and rider postal delivery system could only go at the speed of a canter or gallop. Back to the yodelling perhaps?
Given the speed of light, it would stand to reason that visual communication might give the process some welly. Semaphore was perfect for messaging over long distances, requiring an eyeglass and a good attention span. Flag waving and light signals became de rigueur in the eighteenth century. Anyone who wanted to be someone would have had their people standing in high towers, on distant hills, waiting for some bloke to flap their flags at them.
Thanks to Samuel Morse, and lots of overhead wiring, telegraph came into use in the 1830’s and 40’s. Hence, things could be delivered more quickly, depending on the reach of the overhead wiring network. Dots and dashes could be transmitted across continents, and messages could be transmitted instantly. The railways allowed their reach to expand even further, and soon the instruments were installed in post offices. The network had begun to spread its web.
The appearance of the phone was prophetic, the progenitor of what would become a mass produced pocket-sized necessity. I wonder what Alexander Graham Bell would make of the i-phone? Perhaps he’d be an android man? He was awarded the patent in 1876 despite a couple of earlier phone models being produced by an Italian, and then a Frenchman. Surely he couldn’t have forseen the enormity of this collective global connectivity as a consequence of his little invention?
Thankfully I’m from a generation who can still enjoy the novelty of a phone that isn’t connected to a wall. I can also quite happily switch it off for the day. I am living proof that you can survive several decades without the umbilical cord of a mobile phone to sustain you. I make it a rule to never text or use my mobile whilst cycling, skating, doing yoga, sitting on public transport or, Heavens to Murgatroyd, whilst driving. Yes, that last one is illegal here, and will incur a fine of $455 (or more) and the loss of points.
Really, nothing is so urgent that it can’t wait until you finish your walk / ride / stroll with the dog. And perhaps you should be interacting with your beloved dog, not just taking it for a drag, given it has been waiting all day for this walk with you, and at the very least would like a bit of eye contact.
These days fax machines seem positively archaic, and the original Apple Mac personal computers look almost jurassic. But how we loved those chunky, clunky very unportable boxes with their electronic beeps and flickering black screens. Remember that lurid green text? You had to be a serious nerd to understand even the basics of all the backslash, backslash, dot, hyphen, www stuff you had to type-in to get online. And heaven help you if you missed a dash, or used a forward slash. Stoopid. Start again.
As many of us dash about in our hamster-wheel worlds, it’s little wonder that some people have initiated ‘slow living’ as their new lifestyle choice, adopting traditional values as well as the slow food movement – the antithesis of the fast food industry. It also involves reducing the stranglehold of technology, and horror of horrors, switching off the phone for a while.
Long before the internet, families sat in parlours, listened to the wireless, and spoke to each other with actual words. Crazy. Sometimes they had a singalong around the piano in the local pub. They used books of maps then, and encyclopedias. They sat quietly on benches waiting for buses, free to wander the colourful corridors of their imagination, needing no entertainment except their own thoughts.
Imagine that.
So unplug all of it, and let your mind wander for a while. Go on I dare you.
Angela J Dawson 