Old Media vs. New

Here's a conversation I overheard between a man and his teenage son who were sitting next to me at a youth baseball game the other day. The boy was totally involved in text messaging on his cell phone and only rarely looked up to follow the game:

Dad: "You have been texting for almost an hour. What's going on?"

Boy: "I am talking with Wendy." (I've changed the name here, but for no particular reason.)

Dad: "Really? For the last hour?"

Boy: "Uh huh."

Dad: "Hmmm, well wouldn't it be great if you could just talk into your phone and have it send the message  for you? Maybe it could even arrive in your own voice?"

Boy: "Hey, that is a really sick idea." ("Sick" here apparently means "rad" in an older teen lexicon.)

Dad: (After a few seconds in which he stared intently at the boy) "Yeah, well maybe someday someone will invent something like that."

Obviously, phones already have that "sick" capability. I may not have the entire conversation exactly right, but that was the gist of it. The Dad clearly knew what he was saying and was waiting for his son to catch on. Maybe he eventually did, but the game ended and they left before I had a chance to find out.

This episode got me to thinking about the nature of technology. Text messaging allowed the boy to talk to his girlfriend with a degree of privacy even while sitting on bleachers within earshot of a couple of dozen strangers. This is a good thing. But it also appears to have engaged him to such an extent that it numbed his brain to the obvious advantages of the older technology. He could choose to simply talk to her! Text messaging is not necessarily the best tool of communication all the time.

As a society, we have become so enamored with electronic media, that we have forgotten some of the more obvious advantages of print. Email, text messaging, websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and every other electronic media you can think of, all have tremendous value. But their value does not negate or replace the value of print. Think about it, if you are one of those accomplished graduates who will be earning their degree or diploma this spring, would you want the certificate emailed to you?