How Wired Magazine Makes Me Feel Old

As I was catching up on some of my Wired magazine reading, I discovered that I have nearly been through the full cycle of an evolutionary process involving the telephone. While I realize that people who are 10, 20 and 30 years my senior would perhaps disagree and scoff at my mention of being through the entire process, as I do realize that the actual process began way before my birth, their feelings on the matter do not entirely dismiss the facts that I came to recognize this scenario as I was catching up on Wired magazine reading.

When I was a child of 10 years old, I sort of moved back in time as I relocated to a small town in western Minnesota. It was an interesting experience having come from one of the largest cities in the U.S. prior to this trip to the rural countryside and a town where there were less than 2000 residents within the city limits and no two houses sat within a mile of one another on the outskirts of town.

In this tiny Minnesota town, the use of area codes for making a telephone call was not yet in effect. In fact, not even the first three digits of the telephone number after the area code were being utilized to make telephone calls in this town. Not only this, but there was actually a telephone operator on the other end of the line that would talk to you if you mistyped the four-digit number that one would use to make a phone call and you always had to talk to the telephone operator if you were going to make a long-distance call because they had to use their little circuit board in order to grant you access to dial out of town.

As the years passed by, eventually, even in this little town, enough people had purchased telephones and the number of external town calls that were being made created a need for the members of this town to begin using a more automated telephone system not unlike the systems used in large cities such as I had come from.

This memory just came to me as I read a Wired magazine article today entitled “The Phone Call is Dead.”

This article discussed the decrease in telephone usage now with the increasing popularity of other forms of media, mostly focusing on the text message, which is still of course a form of media that originates from the telephone, but  not the traditional telephone as was previously in use at the time when I was a child and you had to be sitting at home in order to receive a phone call, but the telephone that is portable, mobile, the exciting invention that supposedly causes radiation brain cancer….

Thinking about this also reminded me of the beginning of cell phone technology. One of my family members was actually in the industry of cell phone development, maintenance and progress when I was a small child, so in my home, we were among those few who held the monster sized cell phones to our ears to make an exciting phone call from any part of the country where cell phone towers actually were operational and my family member was actually one of the people who traveled across the country attempting to make sure that these towers functioned correctly so that people all over the country could speak to one another without being at home sitting by the phone.

The advent of cell phone technology and the spread of it’s popularity has caused many people to lament over the change of life where suddenly everyone was expected to be available at all times without regard to what might have  been going on in their life. The pager, of course, was more of the beginning of this process as people who couldn’t or wouldn’t choose to afford a cell phone carried a pager so that they could be “beeped” at any time and then go to a pay phone or use someone else’s land line or cellular telephone in order to return the “urgent” call for which they had been “beeped.”

This created another culture where the dramatic demanding people were more easily identified and recognized as such due to the experience where some people recognized that  a pager was to be used for emergencies only, while other people abused the paging technology to demand the instant attention of whomever they wished to contact.

Instead of punishing the demanding and dramatic individuals by eliminating the pager technology or through some other method, this pager technology simply became a thing of the past in exchange for the more effective way of demanding attention immediately through the much more widespread use of the cell phone, such that everyone was expected to both own a cell phone and answer it at all times, unless they had “a damn good reason.”

We have been, for some time now, required to be available to anyone and everyone at all times without regard to our own individual sense of need for privacy and personal time.

Now, however, as this Wired magazine article suggested, we have come full circle and are moving back to a time of a bit more courtesy and less demanding technological time where people instant message one another on the computer and text message each other on the telephone, rather than demanding an immediate phone conversation.

With a text message you can state your note or cause for contact and then rest assured that the intended received your note without requiring an immediate response. With instant messaging, you can look at the recipient’s status in order to determine if they are busy or “out” or if another time would be better. If someone appears to be busy or out, as their status indicates in the instant messaging contact box, you can simply email that person to give them the message you want them to receive so that they can read it at a later time or date.

If you don’t feel like being bothered this week, you can have an automatic “vacation” response get returned to the people who are attempting to contact you so that they have a bit of a reply to know what’s going on and don’t have to be left wondering without recourse…. You can even tell people that while you won’t be responding to email messages this week, that you will certainly be reading them and if anything is urgent that they can rest assured it will be handled.

With the advancement of technology, a full evolutionary cycle has nearly come full circle in so many technological, cultural and social ways and as humankind grows and adapts, I find myself realizing that the years have passed me by and that in my 30′s I am a bit aged due to now having memories that many of the people I meet do not even comprehend the lingo that accompanies these memories….

Anyone remember…”Hey Mom! Guess where I’m calling you from!!!” – (Radio Shack and the telephone in the football…..)

Ah….the passage of time…..

Advertisement