07.08.07
passing phase
There’s a cartoon today where a teenager is trying to arrange a band practice, and having to make phone call after phone call because he has to keep revising the plans because each new person has some conflict with the plan of the moment.
I read that and thought to myself, “someday that will seem quaint”. Someday, you’ll pop open your cell phone, tell it who you want to meet with, and it will take care of the arranging. Each person will get contacted with a list of possible times, and have the option of a hard veto or a soft veto. The communications infrastructure will take care of doing the negotiating.
In thirty years, college students won’t really understand how you could possibly do it any other way, just like they now don’t fully understand what a pain it was to use a typewriter to fill out a form, or what a mimeograph was.
College students today still remember vaguely that once upon a time, there weren’t TV remote controls, answering machines, VCRs, or cell phones. In ten years, college students won’t have any concept of what it was like to have to negotiate down to three square meters exactly where you were going to meet, with contingency plans for what to do if the rendezvous failed.
