The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.
Unlike then, the mail stream of today has diminished by such things as e-mails and faxes and cell phones and text messages, largely electronic means of communication that replace mail.
Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I've given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days.
I would absolutely love to go back to the simplicity of the '80s, where there wasn't texting, social media, iPhones, or smartphones. I love the fact that you would go home and check your messages. I'm not well suited to the world of modern technology.
Social media is the most disruptive form of communication humankind has seen since the last disruptive form of communications, email.
I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.
Communication has changed so rapidly in the last 20 years, it's almost impossible to predict what might occur even in the next decade. E-mail, which now sends data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light, has replaced primitive forms of communication such as smoke signals, which sent data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light.
I remember the first time I heard a teenager say 'LOL.' Just what? But it means 'laugh.' Why don't you just laugh? What are you doing?
I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.
There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.
What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call.
Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.
No communication technology has ever disappeared, but instead becomes increasingly less important as the technological horizon widens.
My younger son told me nobody uses email anymore. I'm this old fogie with my email. I don't know what I'm supposed to communicate with now - SnapChat?
How has podcasting changed things? A lot of people ask me if I feel I should be more famous.
The possibility of interpersonal communication has increased substantially with contemporary technology. But as compared with the major changes, which were long ago, these are not huge.
In the past, before phones and the Internet, all communication was face-to-face. Now, most of it is digital, via emails and messaging services. If people were to start using virtual reality, it would almost come full circle.
Society is causing us to talk less and interact more digitally. So, I'd be remiss if I didn't believe that businesses will have to follow that same path.
Before digital and mobile communications effectively tethered us to an invisible, infinite 'wire,' even those with the most hectic schedules were usually willing to answer the phone if they happened to be home when it rang.
The way communication works is changing.
Just take ease of interchange between people. Your email is of course faster than letter - on the other hand the transition from sailing ship to telegraphs was far greater than the shift from the postal service to email. That was a fabulous change. If you sent a letter to England, instead of waiting a couple of months for a response you got it instantly. That's a huge change. Every one of these changes of course increases opportunities and also increases means of control and domination.
It's amazing how email has changed our lives. You ever get a handwritten letter in the mail today? 'What the? Has someone been kidnapped?'
It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
Now we're e-mailing and tweeting and texting so much, a phone call comes as a fresh surprise. I get text messages on my cell phone all day long, and it warbles to alert me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook or a reply or direct message on Twitter, but it rarely ever rings.
