When Bell received the patent for the telephone, (I say patented, because many other smart fellas worked on the idea during the same era and knowing the worth of intellectual property, I will not give credit to Bell at the expense of the others... but I digress) I am sure he had the idea that one day, communications technology would come to the point where, you don't even need a physical phone to make a phone call. Of course he probably didn't know exactly how it would be done, but being a man of science, I sure he thought about the possibility.
Of course now that communications technology has come to the point where we need less physical lines to convey our emotions, voices, and ideas, a new question arises. Do we always have to be available to receive the communications of others?
Saying this, I am imagining the days before the telephone, heck, before email, or Facebook, or Twitter. Wasn't it just cool to just be at peace? You wanted to say how your family was doing you wrote a letter, and waited weeks, even months for the other to get the message, and even more time to get the response. Your significant other went off to war you worried in peace, or forgot about them until you got the next letter. Back then, people had time; time to think, decide, feel, cry, laugh. Since there was nothing else to be done you could read a letter twice, and replicate, dare, reconsider an emotion to to someones communication. Disclaimer: I was not there, so I imagine it was so.
Conversely, with the speed of communication in our era, we spend a lot of our time listening to , reading, sharing and re-twitting peoples ideas, and ours too. Industry is using the same technology to sell us more shit than we need also, mostly because we have become used to deciding instantly. I can only wonder how life would be if we decided to unplug, to think about nothing for a while. Zero data, form our own opinions based on prolonged analysis of small data sets, moments of time at a time.
Life could be less stressful without people constantly wanting to sell us something,or tell us and our three thousand friends about something. Life could be easy without the constant updates on life or the red car that drove by, or the sandwich that they were having for lunch. Should we really care about latest news in politics or crime, or entertainment? I wonder how much of our sleep time that I was probably dedicated to nerve repair, is spent on processing the daily noise. I'm sure that a paper will be out on that some day but until the day when a expert says that too much data is bad for our brains, just like too much sugar, and too much fat, I pledge to spend significant amounts of time off grid.
So if I don't respond to your email or phone call, or Facebook status in thirty minutes to a day, no worries mate. I'm probably off grid, and I'm sure whatever it is can wait.
The irony here is that I using the same forum to convey my ideas... yea , but I'm no hypocrite I don't expect your immediate response, or even a response for that matter. I'm just adding more data to your REM sleep processing. Do I think that communications technology is bad? Of course not. But I am certain that too much of anything will surely kill us sooner.
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