When I was a young child our family lived in a small two-room log cabin in the little farming community of Croydon, Utah. The first room, which served as a combination living room and bedroom, was the original log cabin built by someone many years before. The second room was a lean-to tacked onto the back of the log cabin to provide a tiny kitchen area. The addition of a small, round, tin tub on Saturday night turned the lean-to into a temporary bathing area. There was no toilet except for an outhouse located way out back, and in the winter the distance from the cabin to the privy, as it was sometimes called, seemed to increase every time the temperature dropped. The food storage room was a dirt cellar beneath the house, with half the cellar under the log cabin and half under the lean-to. The trap door to the cellar was in the doorway between the cabin and the lean-to so that if someone opened the trapdoor to the cellar, everyone else had to stay in the room where they were when the door was opened. In the spring it was easy to get a jar of home-bottled fruit because the cellar would often flood and the jars of peaches would float around just below the trap door.
I was thinking the other day just how much communication has changed since the time I was a child. That thought came to me as I was waiting in line to order a new phone that would let me talk to anyone anywhere in the world at any hour and from any location, give me access to the internet, handle complicated and heavy duty calculations, let me send an instant letter without using a stamp, predict the weather, let me search for information, guide me to an unfamiliar destination, let me play games or watch a movie, let me send a message at a time convenient to me and let the receiving person view the message at a time convenient to them, and let me take slow-motion videos without the need for pricey equipment. And all of this will fit into my shirt pocket without causing a bulge or making my shirt sag.
Communication in my childhood was mostly by holler. By that I mean that if you wanted to talk to a friend who was out in his field irrigating you would just walk half a mile to where he had planted his crop and stand at the fence and holler until he looked up. If a child wanted to go play with a friend, he or she would walk a mile and a half to the friend’s house and then stand on the front lawn and holler until the friend came out. If you wanted to get someone’s attention quickly, however, the accepted technique was to whisper the information in confidence to someone close by and the secret would spread all over town before you could get home. The rumor mill, by the way, is still the best method for rapid communication in a small town…..especially when it is aided by the use of my new phone.
All the features I mentioned when discussing my new phone seemed at first to be an improvement in communication. Then came texting. Don’t misunderstand. I like texting. I use it a lot, in fact, because it is the only sure way of reaching one’s grandkids. It also allows me to send a message to people any time of the day or night without worrying that I might be interrupting a nap or a meeting. The thing that worries me, though, is that there is a whole generation coming along who doesn’t know how to communicate using complete sentences, punctuation, and real words instead of teenager hieroglyphics and emoticons. And that is tough as well as confusing for those of us who are part of the senior citizen generation. I am embarrassed to admit that I once received a text from a gorgeous lady and the text ended in “lol” which got my heart pumping because I thought it meant “lots of love.” Think how embarrassed I was to discover that in today’s vernacular “lol” means “laugh out loud.” So much for my being attractive to gorgeous ladies. :’-( Teenage speak meaning sad and crying.
