Long ago, communication meant a landline phone, a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. If somebody called about having dinner next Thursday, you walked your happy ass over to a calendar and wrote it down. Done. Nothing else to do before next Thursday. The olden days also meant phone tag and phone fights. Has anyone else slammed down a receiver hard enough to rip a landline rotary phone out of a plaster wall? (It’s deeply more satisfying than fingering a touch screen.) Phone machines and voicemail are a curse on humanity.
Then came email. I worked for a managing editor at the time he was given his very first email account. The guy would email my desk from his office six times a day, and then call me on the phone to see if I got the email, ask why I hadn’t answered yet and tell me everything that it said. (Because I am writing and editing copy for your newspaper, dumbass. When I’m in Quark editing copy, I am not on the internet or opening your emails.) He never did understand how that worked.
That particular phone was not in a plaster wall. It survived being slammed around for years, but succumbed to being filled with ink by a cranky pressman who was fired for the deed. (It happened because editorial muck-ups meant extra long hours for the pressroom, and you know what they say about paybacks.) Everyone’s (not so) favorite managing editor walked around all day with smeary black inkface from the phone and never knew it until the publisher told him at the end of the day. None of us dared tell him. Oh the lulz!
Emails could be sent or read, blocked or ignored, deleted or answered at midnight or 4 am, in your pajamas, in the buff (no such thing as webcams or Zoom back then) or at your desk in the office, and could include pictures or documents as attachments. Email was cool until people started decorating email messages with a godzillion megabytes worth of flowers, stars, fairies and signatory messages and slung together hundred message threads. Still, email was an infinite improvement over the telephone. Then came the cell phone.
Cell phones arrived and the difficulty of, and time required for, clear communication expanded like a microwaved marshmallow. Plans for anything could be stretched into days of chasing vague cryptic messages. The phone goes off at the very moment you have lifted your fork toward a hot meal, dropped trou for a sit on the throne, just fallen asleep, settled into a warm bath, or merged into 6 lanes of traffic.
Landlines defined the conversation with a beginning and an end. Emails waited for you.
Cell phones freaking own you when every discrete thought becomes a message fragment. Whoever decided to call those things smart phones was smokin' some really good stuff.
I will always know that if God had meant for people to type on two-inch screens, She wouldn’t have given us full-size computer keyboards.