July 5th, 2006
As I sit here trying to concentrate on my work, there is a little DHTML-based ticker in the lower right corner of my computer screen telling my all about the flight of the airplane my wife is on. Right now it says that it is "on schedule" and that it departed "on time". I'm glad to hear that, of course, but I worry about things like inter-plane transfers at busy uncaring airports, where she got burned twice on her last trip. I refer you to this rant: Aeroflot, you bastards! and this rant: Air Canada, you bastards!
Well, I think those layovers and plane-transfer problems that she encounters are just as hard on me as on her. I mean, she might be the one having to lie on an airport bench and try to sleep while she waits for her plane, but I don't have a beauty-rest myself. I sit and quiver and foam and fume that I am not there and can't do anything to help or at least entertain her ... it infuriates me to feel myself rendered so powerless by the geographical distance between us.
So as I type this she recedes from me at the dizzying rate of about a kilometre every four seconds. Hmm ... the world really isn't as small as we make it seem. I mean, it seems pretty small when you can walk around talking on your cell phone with someone on a completely different continent walking around talking on their cell phone. But then when something goes wrong and you need to be there, or you need to get something to them ... well, that's when you suddenly realise the world is just as big as it always was, and when somebody is far away ... they are really far away!
If you think about it, there are two ends of a spectrum: Transportation and communication. The better one is, the less you rely on the other. You may never eliminate either, but they exist together in a state approximating co-dependence. From the 1950s to about the 1970s, we humans went to extremes to expand transportation. It is in those decades that we really made the world seem small. But in the 1980s through to about now, our ability to communicate around the world grew exponentially. That won't continue, of course, but for now, the ability to talk more and more cheaply, and to send near-instantaneous emails and faxes, has made the world seem not only smaller, but faster and more immediate as well. Intimate, even.
Well ... until the computer won't boot or there is no electricity or the telephone lines are down (and the satellite is busy or pointed somewhere else). Suddenly, without those communication technologies, the world slows down a whole lot as well. To be honest, I'm not sure I don't like it when it does.
I mean, we are so hell-bent on paving everything we come across, clearing the land, building "something ... anything!" that we lose sight of the fact that sometimes there is a joy and beauty in the mystery of the unknown and the untamed. What I mean is this: When the world is small and it takes a short time to move through it, or communicate across it, we may gain immediacy and lose that fear of the unknown, but we also lose the joy of taking our time and enjoying the journey, and we lose the thrill of the mystery and the delight of discovery. I am not proposing that we dismantle all our jumbo jets and disconnect all the Internet trunk lines ... but I think we should all acknowledge that for all the gains we get from those, we also lose something.
OK, but none of this is able to change my apprehension: My thoughts and concerns remain with my wife and whether or not her journey will be an uneventful one; right at this moment, the world still seems awfully big.
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