The Incredible Speed of Change
The rapidity of this transformation in basic communications has been mind-boggling.
When I was young, my Aunt Betty, my mother’s sister, lived in Milan, Italy.
I can remember when we used to call her, you had to put in a request to the overseas operator to place a call to Milan.
Then, some time later, the phone would ring, and the operator would get on and say she was ready to connect you to Milan.
“Hello, Milano, are you there?” the operator would say,
A few more minutes, and we would hear the phone ring in Betty’s Milan apartment, and if we were lucky, she would pick up the phone and we would yell, “hello!” hoping she heard us. My father, who could squeeze Lincoln off a penny, kept a careful watch on the clock, and after three minutes, he would tell my mother, “OK, time to say goodbye.” Overseas calls in those days were expensive and complicated.
I had not realized how recent even the concept of an overseas phone call was until I saw the article from The NY Times above (courtesy of Kathy Gill, a very prolific writer about history and technology.) Today, my wife and I live in the UK, in a very small village in the middle of nowhere (population 92). Even so, we have an Internet connection that gets a blinding 1.5 gigs. My mother these days lives in Miami. Yet if we want to talk to her, all we have to do is get on FaceTime, and there she is, in video no less, and for no cost and instant.
The rapidity of this transformation in basic communications has been mind-boggling. I am old enough to remember going to the NY World’s Fair and standing in line for an hour or more at the ATT pavilion to take a look at the Picture Phone — a telephone of the future where you would not only be able to talk to the person but see them as well. In the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, a Picture Phone is used to communicate between the orbiting space station and earth. On the screen is not only the family on earth but a rolling charge for the call. We used to drop dimes and quarters into payphones to make more local calls on earth.
All this, of course, has been wiped away by technological advances. Wiped away.
This brings me to the news business.
If you are ever in New York, visit the Museum of Broadcasting on East 53rd Street. There, you can access old TV newscasts from the 1950s, about the same time as the first phone call was made between Europe and the United States.
The thing about those old newscasts is that aside from the color (they are all in B&W), they don’t look all that different from a nightly newscast you might see today. The same anchor sitting at the same desk, reading the same autocue, cutting to the same ‘packages’; same reporters doing stand-ups.
While the technology of communication has changed at blinding speed, the application of that technology to the news business has, for all practical purposes, not changed all that much. Oh yes, we have moved from film to tape to digital, but on screen, it all pretty much looks and still feels like 1962, but perhaps with better music and graphics. And some people even shoot on phones now. But overall, it still looks and ‘feels’ the same. We produce the news, and you watch it. But what would happen if you took a leap into the future and married the power that things like the iPhone allow? Instead of appending them to a 1962 TV newscast, you created an entirely new news architecture, derivative of the iPhone first, an iPhone everyone has. What would it look like? It would look a lot like UnPress.