A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOW COMMUNICATION DEVOLVED When the fountain pen was invented, we got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, we got Jack Kerouac. And with the advent of the smartphone keypad we get... Donald Trump on Twitter. It's not just the written word that exhibits "degradation of the species." The quality of what's communicated seems to decline steadily with every advance in the ease of communicating. And the decline started right from the get-go. Samuel Morse invented the telegraph in 1844. The first words he sent down the wire had gravitas, were thought- provoking, and possessed a literary pedigree (King James Bible, Numbers 23:23)... "What hath God wrought." But by 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, messaging
If there be e-volution, there surely is de-volution, a degradation of the species. – H.S. Carpenter, 1882
THE COMPUTER IS A HANDY DEVICE. It's terrific for looking up who played Wally Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver . But the computer is essentially meaningless to wisdom, learning, and sense.
They tell us that We lost our tails Evolving up From little snails I say it's all Just wind in sails – Devo, 1977
My laptop may be a great technological improvement on my old IBM Selectric. (Wally was played Tony Dow – I just Googled it.) But there is no historical indication that technological improvements in the way we inscribe our ideas lead to improvement in the wisdom, learning, and sense of the ideas themselves. The opposite case can be made. When words had to be carved in stone, we got the Ten Commandments. When we needed to make our own ink and chase a goose around the yard to obtain a quill, we got William Shakespeare.
10
August 2019
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker