Photo by Felipe Micaroni Lalli.
I keep getting hits from people searching for phrases like:
how families are destroyed due to t.v., phones, and internet.
Who else remembers life before the Internet?
Long distance phone calls were extremely expensive. You only made them on very special occasions, and even then you didn’t talk for a long time.
Packages and letters took days to arrive, and sometimes longer than that if you sent them out over the holidays or your handwriting wasn’t legible enough. You also had to pay not only for the stamps but for the paper, postcards, or greeting cards on which to write your messages as well. There was no such thing as jotting off a quick note.
It was extremely difficult to disprove urban legends. Another kid once terrified me with stories about how a friend of a friend conjured up Bloody Mary. I was old enough to be skeptical of it but still barely young enough to wonder if it might have actually happened once or twice in the past.
Facts were hard to come by. You had to physically go to the library to look up statistics, dates, names, or places unless you were lucky enough to have a relatively modern set of encyclopedias in your home. I remember making lists of things I wondered about ahead of time in anticipation of having some of those questions answered at our next visit to the local library.
People were easy to misplace. If they changed their last name or moved away, you might never get in contact with them again.
It was quiet. Lonely. Boring. Tedious. Isolated.
I don’t miss that world at all. The one we have now is so much more connected. I can email my parents every single day of the week if I came up with a new question or story for them, and it wouldn’t cost any of us a single penny. I can send a funny joke to my nephew or coo over the newest baby in the extended family for the same price.
This is a good thing.
Technology doesn’t drive families apart. It keeps them together.
I wonder how long it will take the technophobes to realize that.