Online, though, I worry constantly, and with good reason. You want to know what's playing at the local theater? You can find out online, they say. Of course, you could pick up the daily paper and do the same thing, just by turning to the right page. Online, though, you have to log onto the right website, input a lot of information about where you live, what you want to see, how far you want to drive to see it, what time you would like to see it . . . the list seems endless. I had more time when I looked it up in the paper.This brave new world will offer more than television, of course, for it is the conjunction of television, satellite, and computer that will make such a future possible, and social change will be only one result. Another result will be that I will have to decide first whether I want to watch television, surf the Internet, call Aunt Sally, or read the manual for my financial planning software. And, supposedly, we will save time. I think not. I know it will take me a lot longer to decide what to watch when I have 500 choices instead of a dozen or more, or even the four dozen I might have with cable. I have trouble deciding what I want for lunch, and I don't have 500 choices there, either. I could be at this all day. Another technological time-saving marvel is the fax machine. We used to be able to escape work by going home and not answering the phone (if we had the courage to do it). No longer. today, our boss can reach us anytime and send us work as well by means of the fax machine. This is a technology that did not exist a few years ago, though it is related to earlier technologies such as the telegraph. Human beings sought for centuries to send messages over long distances, finally achieving this with the telegraph so that messages could be sent around the world. Over the decades since, the network of wires enabling this type of communication along with the telephone have been put in place so that virtually the entire world |
