Sunday, August 1, 2010

The World...Every Day Smaller

I'm sure that if you're reading this blog entry you're basically just like me: spend a considerable amount of time on line, communicate with people in your life on a daily basis ...wait, what am I saying? You can do that even more often, with the help of the small device we all seem to love: our mobile phone, or simply via Internet, in an e-mail, on Facebook or Twitter and other social networks, and on top of that you can take the internet on the go, you don't just talk on that phone, you use it to stay on line. It's overwhelming how the world is getting smaller and smaller and we let ourselves carried away with it.

We take for granted our phones, our computers, the internet...we forget how it all started. We need it, I admit, and we went so far with it! Maybe too far?? Not so long  ago, in terms of history, a letter was the only way we could contact people that lived in another city, country, or even in our neighborhood. And when we sent a letter in another country, we'd have to wait for weeks for an answer. Today, we'd "freak out" if we had to wait for so long to hear from someone.

And to think it all started with the thin can telephone :) or "the lover's telephone", going through the electrical telegraph and finally to the telephone. I'm sure we all remember images like this :





or maybe this switchboard in an old movie:


And of course the old soon to be extinct all over the world pay phone:


Can you remember those times? Or do you need to ask your mother, father, grandmother or grandfather? I live still with pay phones around, but even those don't use coins like it used to be, they use cards. 

I'm excited to see where we're going with all this, split second communication... Are you? Should we jump into it head first? What do you think? 

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