We live in the century of communication
This morning I listened to Nau’s sermon on communication and prayer. This started me thinking about the huge changes in communication in my lifetime. As a child, we had a big old black phone with a party line so another family might pick up the phone listen in while we were talking to someone else. By the time I was in high school we had princess phones; nice slim phones and extensions in many rooms of the house.
However my kids grew up with a couple lines in the house and a mobile phone when Bec was in high school. What a change; I could talk with her wherever she was. Mobiles, pagers other electronic communications got the Tiananmen Square information out of China in 1989.
The Internet
Of course computers and the Net quickly became part of our world. We could email friends and relatives around the world very cheaply and messages arrived almost instantaneously. We loved it, and this proved t be a very important form of communication, including broadcasting the updates of Hurricane Katrina much earlier and better than commercial communication channels.
After email, we learned to create and use websites, including personal ones. Instant messaging and then voice phone over the Internet (VOIP) for almost free phone calls were next.
Pull, not Push communication
Even though we still get junk mail, junk email, and junk TV ads that we don’t want, today we have the ability to select the material we choose to read or listen to. I guess we just need to become much more selective so we don’t get information overload.
We can now create our own news with RSS feeds on a reader page. We can have the topics we want appear from the sources we love. How will this change newspapers? What about TV programs on demand? Already we are getting quality free information feeds from experts we trust. Will this continue to be free or will we pay for the items we receive? We are also sharing memories and knowledge with people we know and people we don’t.
Politicians
Now we have our politicians on the Net at YouTube trying to communicate with a younger generation. Have you seen John Howard’s short video there? If you have dialup (and I’m still waiting for Telstra to make broadband available to me), you will wait quite a while to see and hear him. By the way, he got a 2 star rating (out of 5) from his audience.
Social networking
I wrote about our high school reunion wiki a few months ago. This website has been created by classmates, now in their 50s and many had hardly emailed before they started putting up pictures and writing comments. It’s now growing quite well and certainly has taken on a life of its own.
Wiki websites and others that allow collaboration and sharing are really growing. Jane wrote about the parallel world of SecondLife where people create a new persona, buy, sell, take on studies, and “live” another life. This is interesting, and if I had enough bandwidth and a better video card, I would certainly try it out. However, I’m much more interested in the social networking of real people who are mostly being themselves. Facebook is one of these sites where in the last few weeks, I have met up with children of my friends who are now living all over the world. This network is growing quickly as people invite their friends to join in.
Where will all this lead?
It is important that students today gain expertise in these and future technologies, but I think it’s also important for the rest of us living in today’s world, otherwise we could miss out on some wonderful interactions and communications.
I’m not sure what’s next, but I am sure that I will still enjoy meeting my friends for lunch or coffee at the uni or in town. Much as I appreciate these new forms of communication, F2F (face to face) communication will never die!
Until next month.
Useful Websites
John Howard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5jtiJPlv4Y
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