Tweet much? That’s not a question anyone would have asked you ten years ago. That was back in the good old days when a simple e-mail was the prime means of communication. Of course, even then texting was emerging as the rage. Texting is something I started doing a few years ago, after I finally learned how to use my smart phone for something other than making phone calls.
Yes, I’m a Luddite, and not all that ashamed to be one. I’m generally two or three technological generations behind the times, and even that might be an overly generous assessment of my capacity to deal with the modern world. Had I been born one hundred years earlier than I was, I would have been the last to get electricity in my house and would have still been resisting a telephone on the grounds that they weren’t safe.
As it is, I grudgingly move when I’m forced to. I’m about to start using Facebook, with a Twitter presence soon to follow. At least that’s what my IT consultant is pushing me to do. He says my blog readership will quadruple just because of the added exposure those two forms of social media will give me. Understand, I have no idea what he’s talking about, but since I know I’m ignorant, it helps me to overcome my inherent resistance to change.
Part of it—my resistance—is basic nostalgia. Whatever happened, for example, to the joy of receiving a handwritten letter from a friend? I’m thinking of the summer of 1964, when I was madly in love, as only an adolescent can be, with my first real girlfriend. We’d gone steady for six months when summer vacation separated us. I was spending the summer working at a movie theater on the Jersey shore, while she was at home on Long Island.
In today’s world, we’d be texting each other constantly and sending photos of each other on Instagram (I think that’s what you do with that one) or via Facebook posts. But back then we just wrote long love letters to each other. And then we’d wait to get one back. I still remember the thrill of receiving each one, even though they said precious little. But there was always that pledge of love that made the whole day seem more special.
We allowed ourselves one phone call a week that summer. And we limited ourselves to no more than 30 minutes because we were using pay phones so our siblings wouldn’t hear us and it was expensive to talk for very long (like maybe $2.00!). I had a couple of prom photos of her that reminded me of how beautiful she was. I’d look at them longingly as I took a break at the movie theater (where I was an usher, responsible for showing the folks to their seats – yes, times were very different).
Things were simpler, to be sure. There was relatively less to do, for one thing. In the town where I worked there were five movie theaters, each showing one feature film. In that same town today, there are only two movie theaters, but they each show 14 movies.
TV in those days was simpler, too. We had seven stations to choose from in the New York area. Smaller towns had as few as three (the ABC, CBS, and NBC network stations). And summer TV was depressingly boring (aside from the baseball games that were usually available on one of the local channels; nationally covered games were limited to Saturday afternoons), with re-runs of all the established series filling the night-time hours.
So we would read books, yes, real books, to pass the time. I did some of my best reading that summer: Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare. I think that was the summer I read “Lord of the Flies,” which changed my view of humanity forever. I day-dreamed a lot, too. And many of my thoughts were about things I don’t think young people think about very much now. They just don’t have the time (or the inclination) to contemplate much, other than what the latest Tweets are from their fave celeb, or how many friends have liked the posts of their dinner with the guys (or the gals), and wasn’t it great that Bill or Susie got that part-time job or that Clarence and Shayna hooked up the other night.
Am I being an old fuddy-duddy or even a grumpy old man? Hey, don’t get me wrong. I love progress. I mean most of my writing is a thousand times easier than it would have been fifty years ago. Back then, just doing the research to write one of my columns would have taken a week of elaborate study in a local library. Now, I can check out anything from multiple sources that are available on my PC. And the actual composition of my columns is also inordinately easier than it would have been back in the 1960s, when typos were so hard to correct you prayed you didn’t have any, and editing a draft was as laborious a process as writing it.
No, I’m not complaining about the progress we’re making. I’m just wondering if all of it is making our lives richer and our world a better place. Wasn’t it a lot easier, for example, and a lot more fun, to fly from here to there back then? We never even contemplated a terrorist attack, let alone a security check that required us to take off our shoes and belts before we could get on our flight.
There wasn’t a great fear that we were destroying our planet back then, either. Pollution was something that the folks who lived in Los Angeles had to deal with. It wasn’t even a concern for the rest of us. Carbon emissions weren’t even part of our vocabulary.
But mainly, I’m just nostalgic about that joyful feeling of reading a love letter from a high school sweetheart. Call me crazy, but I just don’t think kids get to have that feeling today.