Originally published October 2, 2010
It wasn’t a lazy Saturday for me (instead of the schedule I was trying to keep, I ended up cleaning house anyway), but I’m resting now with Netflix streaming on the big screen and a Blackberry in hand. I’m tickled pink over how much high tech has changed not just our lives, but also how life – and its sensationalized drama – are portrayed on film.
Every time I watch an old movie portraying anything involving the way people communicate, I chuckle a bit. Any early period movie is a laugh; people delivering messages by courier pigeon or pony express is just too much anymore. Remember when people still wrote letters to each other? Even movies showing a written letter’s journey makes me smile a bit.
Then there are movies showing phone communications. Right now I’m watching a 1977 comedy, and watching some kidnappers get in touch with their victim’s owners made me shake my head. People actually had to rely on others to be wherever they were calling. Otherwise, the phone would either just ring off the hook or go to a “super high tech” tape recording answering machine.
People calling each other and actually reaching someone on the phone where they’re being called, which apparently only happens in the movies, is also a thing of the past. You’d think with today’s tech making the world smaller and access to this tech in mostly everybody’s hands, actually staying in touch would be even easier. Ha! Who answers phones anymore?
Even more fun is watching people finding info on other people and places. How Internet access has changed that! My favorite flicks, of course? Old newspaper flicks. I love watching everything from editors’ ulcers over deadlines to reporters’ squabbles over creative liberties to printers’ gripes about faulty printing presses…
Ironically, I read the news online these days, but I remember when newspaper and magazine subscriptions meant getting SOMETHING in the mail from time to time. Today, the only real mail, as opposed to junk mail, I get is one, solitary bill per month from the water department. If the bums ever go paperless, as all my other vendors have, I wouldn’t even get that one!
Maybe that one piece of mail is my last link to what’s real about the way communications – and life – used to be before the advent of microtech designed to make the world smaller and the growing popularity of the great cloud. (Between us, I still pay that one paper bill online anyway, but… Y’know what I’m saying!)
Well, that’s all. Just blasting on communications, on which watching older movies makes me reflect sometimes. Enjoy your tech vices and have a great weekend!