Restoration of interactivity

My daughter signed up for a Vodafone Plan that included an allowance of 5000 messages (sms) every month. Why this ridiculously high number, I wondered. Would any sane person be able to send around 170 messages every day?

In the first month, her message score was 4000 and by the second month she had comfortably broken the 5000-barrier. Casual conversation with some of her friends revealed that this really was no big deal.

What kind of idiocy has gripped this generation, I thought. We cannot let new-fangled technologies rule our lives.

Then I came across a link to an article that Douglas Adams had written in 1999 soon after the Internet made its presence felt. Commenting on the view that it was just another silly fad, Adams wrote:

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

And on the specific subject of messaging (the facility had just been introduced on phones in Finland) he wrote:

“Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."

Another interesting point that Adams made was that, for much of human history, entertainment had always been interactive (theatre, music, sports...). Twentieth century with its entertainment forms (movies, radio, TV) of the non-interactive variety was actually an aberration. Internet merely restored the interactivity.

Update : Tyler Cowen explains, in an article, that far from reducing our attention span, technologies such as the Internet help in widening it.