Mucks’ Minute #24

The Communications Revolution and its’ Long Term Consequences

 

Remember, way back when, when a family would gather in the living room on a Sunday evening, supper plates in hand and listen and laugh at Jack Benny on the radio? Or what a telegram was? Or when the old fashioned rotary telephone came off the wall and turned into a box with buttons on it?

Remember when your kids would come running up and ask you what this word meant sounding it out phonetically as they went?  How about that day when your child came home from school proudly displaying a sheet of paper – lined, of course – with his or her name first printed on one line and then – wonders of wonders – written in cursive on the next line?

Remember when there were block parties (both urban and rural) where once a month or so, a big pot luck would be held in someone’s back yard or at a local park or lake?

There are so, so many things I remember that have vanished with the advent of communication technology from simple Morse Code over a wire through radio to black and white TV through smartphones, IPads, Desktops, Internet and all the other highly isolating faux connecting technology that flows into the market every second of every day .

There are huge number of both positive and negative psychological and physical effects of these technological advances of which almost all are aware of the positives but very few are even conscious of the negative aspects – until it’s forced in front of them by one experience or another.

Me?  I’m all for technological change.  What I hate is having it thrust down my throat whether I want it or not.  I write with a pencil and paper a lot – to my wife’s sometime confusion because I was never good at handwriting (or spelling) at any level in school…I’m an engineer/scientist and they fall in the same group as doctors in the penmanship area!

I do love my Mac, its’ wireless mouse and keyboard and the much improved productivity it offers in all areas ; the WEB sites that are accessible for research, email, writing legible articles, letters and all such – the areas of use expanding faster than I can stay interested in it..

I had a fairly major setback today, when my broker’s robot tried to force me to change from the standard “user name”/”password” access I’ve enjoyed forever to use “voice recognition” technology to access my account.  Since my sweetie and I am both listed as owners of my meager investment and cash accounts, what happens when I die of a heart attack and my wife needs to access the Account?  Or do we yodel into the robots ear together.  When I questioned this I didn’t get a satisfactory answer and therefore (politely) told them I’m not interested in “voice recognition”.  Ah but the damn robot kept trying to force me to set up a voice recognition account – even when I tried to contact a representative directly..  I eventually located a human being in Denver who got the problem straight and disengaged me from having to argue with a robot any further (we’ll see how long that lasts).  By then I was a wee bit less polite.

I’d also like to know how one uses voice recognition when signing in, on line, as opposed to the telephone but by the time that occurred to me, I was too ticked off to either ask or try it.  Boiled down to the fact they couldn’t answer my questions and I – very calmly, of course – the first time – told them they be really smart to go back to the drawing board with it as they had released a God-awful piece of crap on the customers.  The reply to this suggestion was muffled.

Modern media (i.e. NBC, FOX, ABC and CBS and all the other Alphabetic brands and a chunk of PBS) are a joke as far as any serious informative output. They are bought and paid for by the ruling media elite of this country and broadcast only what they are told to broadcast.  Now, however, PBS is smarter than usual, accepting great gobs of money to help sell lousey political policy (i.e. Iran’s “deal”)!

Further, Television is going down the tubes along with human sensibility and intelligence right along with a good chunk of common sense.  I don’t even watch news any more except for local possibility of disaster, hurricanes and such. The rest of it is twaddle. (Good word “twaddle”! It cover so much territory.)  Nothing but murders, robberies, wrecks, assaults and killings dominate local new coverage to the point that anyone who listens to the crap is dulled to uncaring about it all.

We used to just have radio. Now we have radio (an almost forgotten media nitch), TV, “smart” phones (I don’t), iEverythings and Internet, and most people, especially under 40, seem to be attached by an umbilical to it all.  It’s downright scary to walk down a street or through a mall these days as you’re likely to be unintentionally attacked by a zombified teenager, or older,  talking to two people far, far away and sending a text message to someone else while reading two that just came in.  Eyes Front! (my tender old ass)…

These marvels of the technological age are very rapidly disconnecting the upcoming generations from any “live person” interface because that’s one interface they can’t build into a box.  Virtual Reality (the next “big” thing) will try, along with holographics, to absolutely make it unnecessary to get off your butt or talk to another person face to face.  The holographics will allow a real person to be as many images as he desires anywhere there is someone to see it. I can hardly wait (sarc please!)…..

Where I live, thankfully, people still walk dogs and talk to one another.  If you want to meet everyone who lives in our modest community, just get a puppy (which we just did a few months ago), walk it, and the world will still come outside to meet the dog.  You are an attachment to the leash, of course, but it beats a lot of non-contact with your neighbors (we still have pot-lucks monthly too!)..  Of course,  I live in a small community of 55 year olds and up (way up) and do not have to put up with the isolation one gets when living among what passes for normal people or way out in the woods digging foxholes and shootin’ possums.

This, of course, will change very rapidly when TSHTF (see Muck’s Minute #25 – coming later) but until that sorry time gets here, my sweetie and I still enjoy a social life – which a whole lot of people are missing when they get into make believe more than- say – an hour or two a day.  I personally exempt, of course, my Mac and the Internet because I want to.  So there..

Truly, it’s the children that I pity and have no small amount of dread for their future. Perhaps I’m so old I simply dread children but I don’t think so for I have 5 Grandsons but they don’t count ‘cause they’re BIG, uncountable GreatGrandpersons (damn that PC)  who are – some of them anyhow – not so big that I’d enjoy them a lot – although they all live “somewhere else” so I don’t get to see them as much as I’d like to.  So be it.

Children are so quick to learn both good and bad and our current media circus (on line and broadcast) feed so much absolute garbage into circulation that no one should be surprised when a 10 year old hauls out a 9mm from Dad’s bedside drawer and blows away some other kid (or daddy) who has pissed him off. Little girls of 8 learn all about sex before menses including the mean and ugly aspects of it. They are quite able to this without the parents knowledge or permission and do so all the time.

Somehow, I think this aspect of our technology will not turn out well as these pre-people continue to grow and apply fantasy, make believe and nastiness to the real world.  I even remember getting a taste of porn in what they now call “middle  school” (used to be Jr. High) when a small blue book would be carefully circulated  with Micky and Minnie doing the dirty within it.  They were called 2×4’s or “flippers” because that was the size – a little blue booklet 2” by 4” and being a flip-read booklet that one riffles the pages to read (movie on paper) and being porn, (I don’t remember if I even knew what “porn” meant back then) was a forbidden fun thing to read and wonder about.  I’m talking before puberty here!.. So the more things change the more they stay the same only bigger, easier to get and out in the open for all to dwell on (or not).

To sum up, kids are visual little people (so are we all, really) and are too easily damaged or de-humanized by a lot of what is vomited on the desktop, the floor or in their hands in front of them.  Visual violence and sex, when not controlled or filtered by thinking adults (I suppose that means anyone over 40 but it might be higher now) can bring a youngster to big grief if she or he acts on it without maturity to keep a handle on it all.  Hence the higher number of juvi gun accidents and teen pregnancies.

I have no clue as to how to improve the situation other than closer parental supervision but with the ever growing number of single parents, latch-key kids and under supervised and unloved kids, I don’t know if there is a real solution.

If you find one, let us know!

End

 

Author: MuckAbout

Retired Engineer and Scientist (electronic, optics, mechanical) lives in a pleasant retirement community in Central Florida. He is interested in almost everything and comments on most of it. A pragmatic libertarian at heart he welcomes comments on all that he writes.

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nkit
nkit

Muck, love your “minutes” and can relate to them easily. Thanks, and keep writing, you old buzzard.

llpoh
llpoh

Muck – you have the patience of Job. I would have told the broker to jam his voice recognition crapola where the sun don’t shine, and moved my business elsewhere.

There are no solutions anymore, I am afraid. Only watch things deteriorate until there is a reset.

card802
card802

I took my bride to my first ever non high school play, Phantom of the Opera, she has seen it four times with our daughter.

At intermission I bet 80% of the people had their cell phones out and texting or on facebook, even the old farts, annoying.

Speaking of annoying………

I had four fat old fuck women behind me, they had a duffle bag full of KitKat bars. I have that sound sensitivity thing where I focus on annoying noises, and opening bar after bar listening to the wrapper’s crinkle is very annoying.

If four fatfuck old ladies have 50 KitKat’s and they eat 45 during the entire play, what do they have?

Diabetes, they all have diabetes, and really fat ankles.

llpoh
llpoh

Card – At a play in London I had to tell the asshole sitting right next to me to put his fucking phone away – he was using it during the play, all lit up and such. He put it away, but got it back out a few minutes later, so I then told him he was about to get the phone jammed up his ass.

He left and did not come back.

Assholes – the world is full of assholes. I would have told them where to stick there Kitkats. I have a very low tolerance for that shit.

YODA_bite me (you know who)
YODA_bite me (you know who)

Llpoh……like what you did.

stanley
stanley

As fellow geezers we don’t have any tech stuff except this computer. No cell phones, we don’t even have a car. Got rid of the last one more than 10 years ago.

But some of these gadgets can be pretty cool.

We were in a bar recently talking with a casual friend, I needed to go home briefly to retrieve something and return to the bar. I noticed the friend fiddling with his sleeve. After a few minutes he announced there was an Uber waiting out front to take me home and return. I couldn’t figure how that could be, but sure enough out front was a car waiting for me. Very puzzling how this had happened.

Later I realized he was wearing an Apple watch with an Uber app, and just by doing some kind of Apple watch magic a car had arrived at our doorstep and the fare was automatically charged to his customer account.

I thought that was pretty amazing. I can see how people get sucked in by that stuff.

Rise Up

I’ve been in the information technology sector for 30 years but still need nature as a break from the complexities of our modern world. My home office is setup where I can view my backyard, which backs up to a county park, and watch the deer, fox, birds, and squirrels all day long as I work. My stress factor is near zero.

But when I get on the road and see people texting and driving, it really annoys me. And the cell phone users as Lloph describes them sets me off, too.

The younger generation will totally freak if/when the electricity goes out for an extended period (months to years if there is another Carrington Event or EMP attack).

comment image

bb

So you claim to be a engineer/scientist ?.I bet you’re an evolutionist with amazing theories as to how it / we all evolved from some cosmic pile of shit godzillaions of years ago by random chance .Right ? Time + chance + another godzillaion mutations and then another godzillaion years just to make one living cell. A supposedly living cell that had no chance of living all by its lonesome in that hostile pile of shit.Right ?
In a way I kinda envy you Muck.Not going tell you why because that would just inflate your pride to the size of Mt .Everest.
I do remember the family reunions we had in the 60s and 70s. ( really happy times )We don’t have those anymore.

geo3
geo3

Way back when, after dinner, my Grandparents retired to the front porch to socialize with passer-bys. Look at modern homes, so few front porch’s. Everyone hides inside

Rise Up

“…climate change – we can argue the shit of what is causing it but it’s changing and we better figure out how to deal with it whether or not we are causing it to get worse or not.”
———————-
Good luck with that. You can’t fool mother nature. Or change it.

Westcoaster
Westcoaster

The Radio industry is sliding into oblivion. Since Clinton deregulated ownership limits during his reign, two companies now own most of the decent signals in major markets across the country. Over the past 20 years, they’ve fired all the talent that made Radio a great medium. The result is overall lower listening levels and most people under 30 rarely, if ever, listen to terrestrial Radio.
Did I mention both of these companies are seriously in debt, with one on the edge of bankruptcy?

Hardhead
Hardhead

we called those little books- ” 8 page bibles” back in the day!! No idea why!!

ditchner

@muck “Evolution is a proven fact and not up for question any more.”

You’re kidding, right? Probability is not on the side of evolution. There is NO chance that the complexities that we find in even the most simple single celled organisms could have developed by chance.

Here is a lecture on the the impossible genetics that would have had to come about by pure chance for evolution to even be considered a theory. The lecturer is a world renown zoologist who used to teach evolution until he reasoned out how impossible it would have been from a genetics standpoint.

ditchner

whoops, wrong link.

ditchner

wtf

ditchner

The title is “105 – The Genes of Genesis / Genesis Conflict – Walter Veith” for some reason I can’t cut and paste the correct url.

Hollywood Rob
hardscrabble farmer

As far as I can tell mankind is responsible for the vast majority of its own problems. We think we know so much but every day we move further and further from the natural world in order to satisfy our own arrogance.

And any parent that saddles their kid with the electronic monkey is just asking for trouble.

Ed
Ed

Pow Wows used to be my geezer safe space. The elderlies like me could wander around and crack our little genius jokes at each other and visit with fellow elderlies we hadn’t seen for a year or two.

The younguns would ask how to build a fire, string a choker or breastplate, cut thongs from a circle of elkhide or about other things they saw us doing. We got a break for a weekend from TV, radio and phones, but that is changing.

I’ve done Pow Wows the past two weekends now that the season is on. At the first one, I noticed that many people my age are walking around with smartphones, showing pics of grandyounguns and past pow wows, beadwork projects and regalia items. That’s a good side of tech, but it still cuts into the break from gadgetry that makes a Pow Wow a recharging event for me.

Tech stuff is good and bad. The content is what determines the influence that the new media has on us. Muck’s observation about walking a dog is good. If the elderlies at a Pow Wow carry their smartphones around to show pics, that’s a little like walking a new puppy around the neighborhood. If, however, they are sitting in their setups after the drum starts, texting or reading FaCIAbook, that’s when the tech is intruding where it does no good.

My old man was a radio engineer for the little local AM station when I was little. He helped me make a crystal radio. We strung the antenna between two big trees and the house and I would listen to broadcasts with an earpiece. Those days, the tech of the times wasn’t too intrusive. Now, it has taken over too much.

overthecliff

I sense melancholy for something that died and the fact that you can’t fix it. Time and life go on without us. We have nothing to say about it. Good stuff,Muck.

bb

Muck ,I do wish you the best with the time you have left.Remember…. In Christ Alone , through Faith alone , by Grace alone .

Suzanna
Suzanna

i went back and looked…no clue about the down votes…
creation v evolution? Each to his own.

people try to shame others into using the hand helds.
I refuse. Connected every minute? No thanks.
I am thinking people are “showing off” with those
gadgets. Showing they can find the answer to things
in less than a minute. Answering that phone/text as tho it
is coming straight from God. Those folks don’t have the manners
to roam in polite society. Perhaps they can lock themselves
into their rooms. Commune with the gadget.

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

Good morning, Walter
Your ex-life companion sent a message, would you like to reply?
President Trump has just tweeted news on the completion of the wall, would you like to offer your sincere congratulations?
Your sexdate sent a message would you like to reply?
Body temp 98.7, pulse 85, pressure 102/70.
Your movie title Klitzkrieg is unavailable, would you like Kim Kardashian does Dallas instead?
President Trump has positive news on the Russian front, would you like to express your support for the troops?
The coward Putin has just invaded Crimea, would you like to ask President Trump to intervene?
Mexican activists have been arrested for defacing the national wall with giant murals depicting our dear President Trump performing unnatural acts with sheep. Would you like to support General Iska’s call for increased deportation of activists regardless of citizen status?
Body temp 98.6, pulse 89, pressure 120/78.
Your sexdate has cancelled, a transgender is available, would you like to invite Caitlyn for tonight?
Kim Kardashian Does Dallas is unavailable, would you like to order Tiger Woods Pulls an All Nighter?
McDonalds requesting dinner reservation confirmation, reply?
Body temp 98.6, pulse 83, pressure 110/70.
President Trump denounces protestors demanding the release of the Clintons from Guantanamo, would you like to send a message of support for our dear leader?
Tiger Woods Pulls an All Nighter is not available, would you like to order Stucky’s Finger Magic?
Tonight’s feature, Oligarchs on Parade starts at 7pm, would you like to schedule for viewing?
President Trump send his sincere appreciation for your support today and everyday. Melania is pleased with your contribution to the country.

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

bb says: Muck ,I do wish you the best with the time you have left.
bb, what kind of fucking kiss-off is that? Nobody said Muck was a goner.

Ed
Ed

“Evolution is a proven fact and not up for question any more. So is climate change ”

No, neither one is exempt from questioning. Human evolution is nowhere near being “proven”and remains controversial, and the same holds true for anthropogenic climate change.

“All I did up above was tell the absolute truth with no embellishments. Why all the down checks?”

What you did was to state an opinion and claim that it was irrefutable truth in an attempt to shut down discussion. That’s why I voted that comment down. It wasn’t a disagreement with your article, just a disagreement with your use of the “settled science” appeal to authority in your comment.

EL Coyote
EL Coyote

Muck About says: the whole point of TBP is [to] start and have discussions…. I only wish “the man with no name” would rewrite a tiny bit of the website so we could reply to specific comments

Maybe we could highlight the specific comment we want to address.

I agree that the little vote thingy is kind of useless, it is like the cop out FB ‘like’ button that lazy people use to get out of actually commenting.

Look, people, I know you don’t like it but the only way we can know if your shit stinks is if you comment so that we can sniff your butt, figuratively speaking. A one sided discussion is a monologue/sermon.

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