Recently, my parents cancelled our home phone number. It was the end of an era; this is the number that I had recognized as my own for my entire life. Why did they cancel it? Because we no longer needed it. No one ever called it anymore, and we never used it to call others. We just used our cell phones. It was merely an extra payment.
In the 1950s, the party line was a common concept. Your phone was connected to all of your close neighbors’ telephones on one line. Imagine picking up your phone and hearing a conversation between your neighbor from across the street and your next door neighbor. Since they were talking, you could not place a call because they were using the line. Of course, if it was an emergency you could ask to use the line. This system had a very low level of instant gratification.
Technology advanced, and we had the home phone (on our own line, so we could use it whenever we pleased). It was, however, common courtesy to not call someone’s home phone after 8:30 or 9 P.M. You also had to share the phone with the rest of your family. Imagine trying to call your best friend to ask to hang out and your older sister is hanging on the line with her boyfriend. This is hardly instantly gratifying.
And then there were cell phones. People lost a lot of respect for the personal time and space of others. You can get calls on your cell phone 24 hours a day. Text messaging made this phenomenon even worse. This is all because people expect instant gratification. Why should they have to wait to get in contact with someone? With the advent of cellular devices, people came to expect to constantly be connected.
Over only 60 years, we’ve transformed from hardly expecting any kind of instant gratification to expecting it all the time. What could be next?
4 comments:
It's crazy when you think about how things have changed in such a short amount of time. As things changed, it progressed to the beginning of the digital natives. That progression also lead to instant gratification, information overload, privacy, safety, identity and other issues only important to the digital natives. It's all part of this huge chain reaction and we have no idea where it's going to end, if it ever ends.
I wrote about a similar topic this week as well. It is unbelievable how cell phones have become almost a necessity. I remember going on training for the Army for a month a couple years ago, and the hardest part about it was being without my phone and being able to be in touch with my friends and family whenever I wanted. It makes you wonder what will be the next invention that will take over our lives.
I think it's crazy how everything has evolved and how one electronic device has such a profound impact on our lives. My family still has our home phone but I constantly hear my parents talking about how it is really irrelevant. The home phone was apart of my life when I didn't have a cell phone but now that I do it's crazy how I don't even think about it anymore.
I'm not sure what could be more instant gratification than a text message, but I do think that video calls are going to gain more popularity. No matter what is next, it is crazy to consider how quickly these advances have been made and how dependent we are of them.
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