From Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death – Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business(1985, written mainly about the effect that television and the Media has had on the way that people communicate and ultimately, think), Chapter 5, ‘The Peek-a-boo World’:

“Toward the middle years of the nineteenth century, two ideas came together whose convergence provided twentieth-century America with a new metaphor of public discourse. their partnership overwhelmed the Age of Exploration, and laid the foundation for the Age of Show Business. One of the ideas was quite new, the other as old as the cave paintings of Altamira. We shall come to the old idea presently. The new idea was that transportation and communication could be disengaged from each other, that space(distance) was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information.

Americans of the 1800′s were very much concerned wit the problem of ‘conquering’ space. By the mid-nineteenth century, the frontier extended to the Pacific Ocean, and a rudimentary railroad system, begun in the 1830′s, had started to move people and merchandise across the continent. But until the 1840′s, information could move only as fast as a human being could carry it; to be precise, meant about thirty-five miles per hour. In the face of such a limitation, the development of America as a national community was retarded. In the 1840′s, America was still a composite of regions, each conversing in its own ways, addressing its own interests. A continentwide conversation was not yet possible.

The solution to these problems, as every school child used to know, was electricity. to no one’s surprise, it was an American who found a practical way to put electricity in the service of communication and, in doing so, eliminated the problems of space once and for all. I refer, or course, to Samuel Finley Breese Morse, America’s first true ‘spaceman.’ His telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified American discourse.

But at a considerable cost. For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make ‘one neighborhood of the whole country.’ It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse. Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau, who remarked in Walden that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate….. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

Thoreau, as it turns out, was precisely correct. He grasped that the telegraph would create its own definition of discourse; that it would not only permit BUT insist upon a conversation between Maine and Texas; and that it would require the content of that conversation to be different from what Typographic Man was used to.”

Mr. Postman goes on to talk more in depth about this new definition of public discourse and that it gave legitimacy to the idea of ‘context-free’ information, making the irrelevant, relevant. This book is a great read.

See if they have it at your library, or through the inter-library loan, or better yet, on tape!

Can you waste time on them?

Sure. Absolutely.

As for the other issue–how people choose to waste their time–that’s something else entirely. TV, games, books, plays …media: Escapism, alternate realities, and glimpses into other lives… all of that may detract from our “real lives” but this isn’t new. Story telling, sharing, dreaming about the lives of others has always been a part of our existence. Facebook, unlike TV and books, allows us interaction with these others.

But, yes, I still like chatting with people face to face too [smile].

~Luke

I also know a TON of people use twitter. I have truly tried to understand, but I am just not there yet. I have a twitter account, but did have not yet clued in yet to how to use it in a way that does not take me away, way to often, from what I am doing for something trivial. Maybe I’ll figure it out someday.

Thanks for the GREAT comment!

(Gasp, Kendall defending Facebook, who has avoided getting one for so long?!)

I do have Facebook now – a rather boring Facebook with zero updates, posts, pictures, quizzes, or whatever the going fad is. However, I didn’t get Facebook for those reasons. I got it simply to communicate with people. Back in my day, we communicated with instant messenger. But that seems to be dying off with the introduction of Facebook. So I got a Facebook, integrated it with my IM program of choice (Pidgin), and now I’m back in business! I’m not saying I won’t ever post updates or pictures on Facebook, but for now, what I have going is working for me.

Shucks, I even use Twitter. Do I post a tweet because I went to the store and found apples on sale for 60% off? No, but I do find it an excellent way to know what’s on people’s mind. For example, I have a close friend who moved to Nevada. We often talk over IM, but obviously we can’t do that all the time. Twitter lets me know what he’s doing/thinking about during the day.

I think Twitter is largely misunderstood. People who work in CubeLand like me might understand this analogy – a Tweet is like telling your coworkers something by ‘yelling’ over the cubicle wall. Acutally, Twitter is often referred to as a “mini-blog.”