Saturday, October 24, 2009

The end of blogging?

Yeah... that's how I see it... At least, the end is nigh for the casual bloggers who used to update their blogs as a form of diary writing, as a form of updating their friends about the things in their lives.

However, a quick sweep through my old networks have found that most of my friends are not blogging regularly anymore. Those same friends can now be found actively involved in FB, whereby they are posting stuff that's about a twitter long.

The thing is, people are slowly using shorter and shorter forms of communication.

The need for speed, as it were, is so intense in our lives that we want to keep in touch with our friends, but we have so little time to write out a long and detailed article.

The days of keeping in touch via a letter seemed so long ago that a 15 year old might not even know what an actual letter looks like. For all you know, when we teach 'letter writing' in English class might seem like redundant in 5 years' time. Heck, even now, my students don't seem to have grasp the entire concept of what a letter feels like.

Not so long ago, perhaps about 20 years ago, people literally kept in touch via letters. My mom, when she got married, wrote a letter back home to tell her mom about this wonderful man that she's met and when they are getting married. That was in 1979, exactly 30 years ago.

Then came the phone call. Back then, we had to literally dial the phone. The phone had a dial whereby you slot in your fingers to the number and you turn the dial around until it hit a point and you let go. Kids, I know that you can't even envisage this in your mind. That was the time of the analog phone.

The digital dial came in when I was about 10 years old, which makes that about 1990. Then, in and about 1995, we were introduced to the 'mobile' phone. The mobiles were so huge at that time that you only brought it around if you were driving! It's hard for the kids today to envisage also a mobile phone that couldn't fit into your pocket. Well yeah, back in those days, mobile phones were bigger than your 15" laptops.

Then, the mobile phones got smaller. I still remember the days whereby the 'text message' was still like the new thing in town. It used to cost RM0.50 per message. And a meal used to cost RM3.00. That's like 6 messages and you've lost your chicken rice for lunch.

And now, about 30 years on, we are so wired that we have seemed to forget how things were about 30 years ago.

Now my mom gets to hear her grandson via the mobile phone. I did not write my mom a letter when I told her about my wedding, and I sure's did not send her a RM0.50 text message.

And then, we come to the point whereby mobile phones are the defunct devices of the future. Today, there's no such thing as just sending a text message.

My parents-in-law keep up with the developments of their grandson via FB. Every month, or whenever we have nice photos, we would load it up into FB and we'd give them a msg asking them to check out the photos.

Soon, everyone will be writing shorter and shorter texts, communicating faster and faster. And this is going to change the usage of language. Sometimes, I feel that teaching English according to the old school methods is so oxymoron. On one hand, we are asking the kids to advance, and at the same gesture, we are restricting their advancement by asking them to keep on looking back.

Let me ask you. After being brought up on push button on your phone, will you even want to go back to dialing your phone the analog way?

Oh... you don't even know what I'm talking about...

3 Comments:

Blogger Bea said...

hahahhhaha! those phones are fun but also a nightmare....especially when dialing international numbers...miss a digit, oops, back to the start...

October 24, 2009 1:19 pm  
Blogger theGodlyLawyer said...

O well... how can I not understand what you are saying? I used to wrote at lease one letter home when I was in England... mom will reply me with telegram, letters or postcards... hahaha... :)

October 25, 2009 7:55 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

hahaha... you just told everyone you're not 15 years old...

SaD.jc

October 26, 2009 11:30 am  

Post a Comment

<< Home

Structured wiring
Free Web Counter
Structured wiring