Logging on

 

Subject: Logging on.

I was watching a young chap yesterday working, or at least following procedure, which accounts for work these days. His modus operandi was the computer and the email system, not the telephone but using the facility by which he could log his actions and record it as work.  He had been asked to find and retrieve a smart phone which had gone missing, been found and returned to the office. This was the last but one link in the chain prior for me to do the actual mileage and act as  postman and deliver it to the person who had lost it.
When I suggested a simple phone call would do he clearly was not happy since there would be no audit of his task.
It reminded me of how far, in my own lifetime we have come in the art of communication.
When I was growing up, most homes didn't have a telephone or TV for that matter and the communication was within the family.  
The information I received was largely from my mother as she moved through her daily task of house work and providing the meals to feed us each day. Her understanding, or lack of, was the pith of our elementary footing in life and from her we gained a naturally lopsided view of how the world worked. School and adolescence moved us on but it was still a small compass of people who effected us and our knowledge was corrupted by the bias of who we knew, or the type of school we attended. 
Even as we expanded our experience, in my case by wandering around the world, much of what we learnt was arms length and thereby personal. A letter written home took five weeks to make the passage across the sea.

 A phone call was a mystifying thing as the international operator contacted the different operators on the route between the sender and recipients telephone system, " hello this is Wanda Wagga is that Sydney, hello this is Sydney is that London, hello London this is Bradford" each with a cheery comment about the weather, something which for me was fascinating keeping  the whole process within the human context, only the accents giving the operator and location away. The actions, people pushing in  plugs into a switchboard, then the instruction to place the money in the coin box so the call could start. All this as both parties waited in a thither of excitement for the call to start and the annual Christmas link between the family begin.

Today we have the video connection (often the call taken in bed, due to time zone misunderstandings, looking distinctly unraveled) when all members of the family tribe appear on the screen, each in their own country sphere, each living their own lives, apart yet connected.
The immediacy of contact, unravelled or not, is great since it seems as if we are in the next room and life's continuous unearthing of day to day events can be shares, as of old. 
Of course there is the downside where human beings, as usual mess up a good thing. Now a days people especially the young are in danger of missing what's going on around them as they sit glued into events many many miles away. The intimacy of family is usurped by the need for contact from who knows what and where. 
The news, both good and unsavoury is served up on a platter of such a wide and varied taste that no gourmet could do it justice. The scope of the information is so vast and unstructured it leads to continuous overload and a sense of bing disconnect by the very act of being connected. The sense that others have what we haven't, leading  us wanting what is not actually relevant to our lives, leading to even greater unhappiness as we structure our wants and needs on the wheel of commercialism. 
From the simplicity of a five page five weekly letter, full of outdated news, to the minute by minute meandering of crazy people on You tube. Is this the progress we strive for or a fetish, where the mind can stay in neutral and reality, 'our reality' doesn't have to be dealt with.
I better log the message anyway, just to show I'm still alive.