Carrier Pigeon Delight!
BBM, Facebook message, SMS, MMS, G-chat, IM, email and the telephone—all on my handset. While the 3G CDMA network may no longer be a new phenomena, I must momentarily pause to recognize that it has reached its way into the hands of the Baby Boomer generation. If you want to assess long-term validity of emerging technologies; don’t look at 14-year-old boys, look at your parents because they have not an ounce of patience for a technology that doesn’t add immediate material value to their everyday life. As I sat across the table from my father last Thanksgiving, he squinted obliquely at his new BlackBerry: “ahh so a BBM is a live conversation while an SMS is terminal, I see.” The inventor never truly knows his invention.
So amid new methods and mechanisms of communication, I beg the question: has it changed why we communicate?
