Local Isolation / Global Reach

Victoria’s Blog post this week jogged my memory about classic technology outposts and the steady creep of advancements in tech. I’m copying my response to her as my Blog post.

Part of human nature is to assume that your current experience is everyone’s experience. I was told by an innkeeper in Rome, Italy once about an “ugly American” tourist who returned to the United States shortly after he arrived because he could not find easy access to a peanut butter sandwich. (I know…. It boggles the mind!) Personally, I would give up peanut butter for life if I could eat nothing but authentic Italian cuisine for the rest of my days. Prosciutto? Gelato?  Red wine on the table? Give me a break!

My point is that advances in technology sometimes slowly creep and sometimes shift overnight. Victoria is fortunate in that she can enjoy relative seclusion and isolation and also be connected instantly to a global population if and when she wishes.

In the mid-1980s at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, our phone service was a 5-party party line. (The younger members of the class will have to Google that to understand what I’m saying….!) In Pamona, Illinois the only phone was at the Pamona General Store. It was a classic turn-of-the-century wall mounted “candlestick” phone with a hand-crank to summon the operator. No keypad. No click-dial. No nonsense. It worked great and everyone loved it. To use it, you’d place the call and then give the clerk a quarter to pay for the call. In 1992, I lived in Benton, Illinois. Touch-tone service was not available anywhere. You had to switch the phone to “Pulse” in order to use it. To make credit-card calls back to the office, I had to dial AT&T’s 800 number operator and have her manually key in the number.

Now, cell phones make that a quaint memory.

Think about all the cinematic drama that would have been rendered useless with a simple cell phone. At the beginning of the movie “Die Hard” the thieves cut all the telephone lines going into the entire building so that no one in the building can summon help. The only way the hero, John McClane, can contact the police is by killing one of them and capturing his radio. (Which is conveniently programed to transmit on the police radio frequency.) Just think: if everyone at the party had a cell phone, the movie would have been over in 30 minutes.

Contrast that with the experience that airline passengers that are stuck on the tarmac for lengthy periods of time. Nowadays, they call their families, the news media, and in one case, one passenger called the president of the airline to ask him what he intended to do to get him off the plane.

Access to communication tools often get instant results.