When The World Becomes to Large

It seems to me, that as our global world becomes smaller, our personal worlds become larger. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe not.

Remember way back when you had to go to the library to look up things or, if you were really lucky, you had a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica (first printing- 1768 in Scotland) at your house? Now all you have to do is sit at the computer and click away.

Remember when mass communication was unheard of? No, well, neither does anyone else. Newspapers (first printed, Germany, late 1400’s-first weekly, Britain 1622) have been around for a long time, but it wasn’t that long ago that newspapers were the only source of mass communication and a large part of the humanity couldn’t read! News got around by word of mouth. The first newspapers were only printed when something “news worthy” occurred.

It also wasn’t that long ago that a person’s interest in the world was pretty much limited to their home town, and possibly an occasional rumor of what was happening in the world outside that town. Top speed for a buckboard and horses is approximately 30 mph- try traveling around the world like that. It was a very large world, while personal worlds were relatively small.

Time moved slower it seemed.

Quantum physics discoveries seem to imply that as the universe expands, time is indeed speeding up, but I was unable to find a definite article on this topic.

Telephones were the next invention that made the world smaller. No longer did you have to wait weeks or months to get a letter from a relative or friend to find out the latest happenings out side of your town.

Then came radio, (first broadcasts to public, early 1920’s) and families gathered together to hear from the world. Before that, printed news traveled slowly. Suddenly news traveled at the speed of radio waves (The speed of a radio wave radiated into free space by a transmitting antenna is equal to the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second).

Television wasn’t far behind (first commercial broadcast July 1st, 1941) and now you could see what was going on as well as hear it. The world was as small as it could get- or so they thought.

Now it’s even smaller, because we have the ability to go out and get the information we want, our knowledge is not limited to what is delivered to us by newspapers or TV. Want to know what’s going on in Tibet (oh, excuse me, the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China) right now? Just get on line and search.

This onslaught of information is enough to crush anyone, but especially those born back when news was something you got at the picnic after church and it consisted of what was happening in your town of 300.

Back then you only had to worry about the three cows farmer Bill lost last week, or the fact that the town mill may close and leave people out of work. Now multiply that amount of worry by about a gazillion as you watch Buddhist Monks killed in Burma, children starving in Africa, floods in Germany, drought in Australia and that’s not even mentioning what’s going on in your own country, state and community. At one time it was a privilege of the educated to stay informed of global events, now maybe it’s not.

Now days you may not know your neighbors, but you can know what is going on around the globe. You probably don’t know the manager of the store you shop in (because the tiny corner grocery store is gone and you now have to drive to the big chain store to shop), but you feel like you know the cast of the latest successful TV show.

The global community has replaced the home town and that is pretty cool, unless you happen to be a 70 year old who feels the world has out grown you. It’s difficult for the young to keep up, how do we expect the elderly to cope?

We can’t really, and they often don’t. Their way of life has passed and they are lost, wondering what happened to family dinners, evenings on the porch and living in a neighborhood where you know the people next door, the banker, the grocer, the cop and the guy who filled the gas tank on your car.

How do you cope when your town has grown so large it’s hard to find your way around even on a good day? How do you keep your family together when the average person now changes jobs every ten years, and often with geographic change as well? How do you cope with 55 mph speed limits, ATM’s, E- tickets , automated customer service lines with menus having 20 options that lead to menus with 20 more options, and self serve everything? Now add in the general anxiety caused by ageing and you have way to much stress for one person. The world has changed, it’s become to large!

And all that modern, time saving, world uniting, robotic stuff looked so inviting back at the 1962 Worlds Fair hosted by Seattle. The Fair used the theme “The 21st Century” and a tag line of. ‘Better Living Through Science” to entice people with visions of a leisurely future in a global community enhanced by automation. Maybe no thought was given to the possibility that the science would run amok and leave the very people who nurtured it lying in its dust.