Friday, March 12, 2010

Advances in Communication

While I sat at the day job and scrolled through a sea of URGENT emails, answered the phone and turned the two way radio down so I could hear what the person in the next cube shouted over the wall; my blackberry proceeded to vibrate its way across my desk. When I caught the little beast, I rubbed the wheel with my thumb. Wow. Now, I had two hundred and thirty-seven emails to read.


And then it hit me. A great blog topic. Communication. How some of the methods have advanced in as short a time as the past thirty years.

My youngest daughter is twenty-nine years old. What does that have to do with communication? My husband and I were stationed in Guam and that’s where she was born. No one in our family met our little bundle of joy until we returned to the United States eighteen months later. Other then photographs sent back home by overseas mail, they didn’t get to meet her until she was eighteen months old.

No internet. No email. No web cam. No video. We’ve advanced quite a bit wouldn’t you say?

Of course, when you’re buried up to your eyeballs in emails, tweets, texts, and IM’s, you might consider it a double-edged sword.

And even in this day and age of instant communication all over the world, sometimes we still don’t talk to the person right next to us. So, maybe we still have some advancement yet to go.  What do you think?