Cyberspace

Unfortunately there were no takers on my last blog re. the the societal impact of the Internet. I figured if no one out there wants to try their hand explaining at least some of the effects of cyberspace, heck I will. So here goes.

I do not have any recent research in hand that might tell me what has changed as a result of the communication revolution in cyberspace. I am including radio, television, e mail, cell phones, I Pods and all the other gadgets that keep us constantly in touch with one another, as well as advertisers and promoters of all kinds of junk that we don’t really need. The air out there is full of millions of messages floating around. I cannot believe we can still breath without inhaling a commercial. (Now there’s an interesting idea.)

One way for me to approach the impact of the cyberspace revolution is to use my own life experience and look at what has changed. Back in the 20s and 30s even telephones were scarce. As a young child in the 20s my family didn’t have a phone and I don’t remember knowing anyone who did. Contact was primarily through visits or the mail. Sunday afternoon was a time when friends would drop by for a coffee, cake and conversation. The latter was the most critical part of the get together. With some friends there was singing around the piano or a poetry reading. So much of entertainment was self induced.

The first change from what I just described came with the windup Victrola and 78 records. Now we began to be entertained by a machine rather than doing it ourselves. I remember hearing Caruso and Sir Harry Lauder singing. “Bridgett O’Flynn where have you been. This is a nice time for you to come in. You went to see a Big Parade, a Big Parade me eye no big parade would take so long the time just passing by.” And so on. Why do you think I remember stuff like that?

That was the very first breakaway from self entertaining. Next came early radio, It was with the help of a friendly neighbor I built a “Crystal Set.” It was a small unit-- a coil a crystal and a big aerial. It required earphones I remember getting WJZ in the middle of the night and thought I died and went to heaven. Radio had started invading of our lives. After my mother died friends took my father two sisters and me into their home.Evening activity became sitting around the radio listening to Amos &Andy, Jack Burns, Charley McCarthy and on and on. Now we really were entertained and didn’t have to to anything but supply batteries to a radio, And then came the newscasters that would be the beginning of the hyped up news programs.

Before radio our news came primarily from newspapers. There probably was a dozen of them in New York, They went all the way from the sedate NY Times through the Hearst papers ‘The Journal American” to the tabloids The”Daily Mirror” “The News “and oh yes “The Police Gazette.” Reading was then an absolute prerequisite for learning what was in the papers. I believe that reading experience stimulated some thinking. Is that’s why people were motre thoughtful about the news than they are today?

With the coming of television one no longer needed to read anything to learn what was going on in the world. That was the beginning of a fundamental change. I think that something happens when we read about news that disappears when it is spoken to us on television. Why I am not sure but when we read something we have to bring some of our own understanding to the subject matter in order for us to process it. In the case of television we have all these pundits and the viewer has to do nothing but nod in approval. For some reason we think they are smarter than we are because they are on the tube. That’s all that might be to it and that’s what has got us in such deep trouble. We stopped thinking for ourselves because we have all the real smart-alecks on the Sunday morning news programs to think for us.

One of our biggest losers to television was conversation. I grew up in a world of endless conversation. No matter the subject there were always people who could talk about it. In my extended family the conversation was politics, economics, art, music and more politics. There were other people I could converse with about automobiles, radio, and yes plumbing. What is my memory of those endless conversations? They were terrific learning experiences. Even if it started out as a heated argument, “how to organize a factory.” In retrospect,it always turned out to be a way of learning. The learning most often occurred well after the conversation. It was the processing that went on often in the late silence of the night that a ahaa moment that said “maybe this is a new way to think about it?” I believe that with the end of conversation we have also lost an important way to learn. The impact of television spin miesters can be seen as people now tend to make final statements that do not stimulate conversation but in fact end it.

Now the airwaves in addition to radio and television are cluttered with cellphones, IPods, text-messaging and GPS units to tell you when to turn stop and go. So what has all this cyberspace technology done for our quality of life? I do know it sure has speeded things up! In the old days when Air Mail first showed up we were delighted to get a letter across the continent in a day. That gave us some time to think between a reply. Now all replies are instant. Does that make them better? I doubt it. It sure speeds things up and hence we have little or no time to contemplate our thoughts on any given subject.

Maybe it’s just me in my 92nd year, but I have a strong felt sense that we, yes we, are suffering from overload. We need electric circuits that cause breakers to cut out the the line before it sets us on fire. Unfortunately we don’t have built in circuit breakers. In its place we have to find any old way to get some relief from the overload. I experience most people I know or come in contact with as BUSY,BUSY BUSY. Yes there are huge benefits from the age of technology, but at what cost? I do not know the answer to that question. Maybe you do?

Thanks kate N.H.W.Y.