Up until 1960s, my Pen Pals and I would mail handwritten letters to each other.
In sixth grade, I received a set of felt-tipped colored pens. These were magical in that I now could express emotions through different colored highlights and designs.
My penpals (used as one word, today) complimented me on my penmanship. I wrote almost perfectly, just like the white script letters on the green cards that used to line the tops of school chalkboards across America.
Back then, I couldn’t wait to get a letter from one of my pals. They’d use fancy stationary with pretty designs, something I never had.
Time moved a bit slower forty years ago and we were more patient.
We had to be.
Remember party lines?
Five families shared one phone line.
If you wanted to make a call, you’d lift the receiver and if someone was already talking on the line, you’d quietly hang-up and try again later. If there was an emergency, you’d ask the caller on the line if s/he could hang-up so that you could make your call.
Try explaining a shared line to your teen who’s busy talking on the phone, while playing a game or surfing the Internet using a tablet.
Remember looking forward to the mailman who carried the big blue bag on his shoulder as he walked up and down the block of your neighborhood dropping letters in each box? You were lucky if you got mail more than several times a week.
What happened?
Those not-so-long-ago quaint times existed while the world’s population was only 3.5 billion. Today, twice as many of us are trying to drink from a fire hose delivering a thousand times more information.
The world is moving fast and TIME is our only fixed income, so it must be spent wisely and multiplexed when possible.
I read somewhere that all the information from the year 0 to 2000 is what we receive each week! My figures may not be exact, but that’s because there is so much information to remember. And if I wrote it down, where would I find it when I needed it?
It’s no wonder we fear forgetting and Alzheimer’s! Look at all that information we need to remember!
Consider that a family of four today likely has five or more phone numbers (four cell, work, landline, and fax).
Instead of 5 families sharing one phone, we went right through a worm hole into another dimension of too much information — one family has 5 phones!
Today, not only do we get daily mail from our mail carrier (half of it we don’t want or need), we also receive eMails to our one, two, or three eMail addresses. To keep track of all the eMails I receive, I have six eMail addresses. We receive text messages on our phones, FaceBook comments, Tweets, LinkedIn updates, and still the occasional fax.
There’s just too much information…and too little time.
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