Is It Just Me…
Is it just me or …
… or are you tired of hearing people say, “Too much information!” when you are relating a story you thought was interesting but they don’t. The fact is there can be too much information at our fingertips and it’s good to temper our use of it. “Too much information,” coming from another human being shouldn’t be the problem. It’s communicating.
Here is a very quick timeline of communication that began thousands of years ago with pictograms, petroglyphs and hieroglyphs. Later, you would have heard Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates captivating crowds with yarns a-plenty. There were sagas from the skalds of Scandinavia, the tales of the troubadours and bards and all the other storytellers of the times. Ah yes, the power of the spoken word.
The quill appeared around 1250, and 200 years later, a guy called Gutenberg fired up the printing press. Morse code came along about 1830 and, lest we forget, the Canadian connection with Alexander Graham Bell and the first telephone. I recall seeing, but being too young to use, one of the wall telephones you would crank to connect with the town’s operator who knew everyone in town and all their gossip.
Commercial television showed up in black and white in the late 1940s, although not until 1952 or 1953 in Winnipeg.
The modern fax machine was available in 1964. Computer PCs were born in 1970s. I also remember owning a CB (citizens band) radio back then and having to learn the entirely new language that went with it. Not terribly different from the text speak we use now. LOL. The early mobile phones were just a bit smaller than the original WW II Motorola Walkie Talkies. The World Wide Web came into effect in the 80s and is still getting bigger while, thankfully, the phones are getting smaller.
We used to wait until Sunday to make a long distance phone call as it was far less expensive that day. Now you can call anywhere in the world on Skype and talk any day, all day, for free. There’s Facebook, Twitter, Smart Phones, Smart TV, Instagram and the list goes on. I won’t give up the daily newspaper. It doesn’t play as big a part of our daily routine, but it is still part of my day.
Remember when we used to yak, gab, chew the fat, chin-wag and chit chat? Now you hear people using bigger words to say the same thing. Someone somewhere sought out a thesaurus to seek synonyms for all those simple words. I think it makes them feel really intelligent when they use their ‘important’ voice and say things like “Let’s have a conversation about that.” or, “We must connect with a discussion and discourse on that topic.” or, “I think it’s time we continued the dialogue to resolve the issue at hand”. What? No time for a quick chat?
After all the genius gizmos and gadgets invented to speed up communication, do you know what is still the number one form of communication? No word of a lie … it’s Word of Mouth. That’s what we use when we catch up on what we are all watching on Netflix and all the other shows on Apple TV.
Hmm. What did we used to talk about … you know, in the old days?
Jim Ingebrigtsen is a broadcaster and entertainer. He serves on the board of CJNU.