Flickr Photo by Nate Steiner (CC BY)
Dial Tones
I don’t know… Can you hear it?
It’s a dial tone; a metaphor I’m using for the whistling between my ears that indicates I’m not making any connections at the moment. I’m trying to think of something to write about and coming up empty.
Hmm. I just realized that making a reference to a dial tone (be it heard solely in my head or otherwise) could actually be a mysterious reference to a lot of people at this point. Unless they have a ‘land line’ in their home, which many no longer maintain, they may not have a clue as to what I’m talking about when I refer to a ‘dial tone.’
That is so weird to me.
And come to think of it, even the phrase itself explains why it could lead to blank stares if you used it in mixed company (you know – in front of people who were born after 1990 or so): the phrase is ‘dial’ tone, after all. Rotary phones have been gone from everyday use for decades now.
Cultural Shifts
What’s really weird is to think that even my own kids have experienced this cultural and technological shift from when they were little. For instance, I remember realizing that we could rent a VCR from the video store near Doylestown and actually bring home relatively current movies to watch at home.
variety.com
Seriously. The first few times we experienced a VCR, we rented it from our local video store. It was encased in a hard, bright orange, protective plastic shell. And I distinctly remember Karl hooking it up to our tv and the three of us, Karl, Karl, and I (M was so little he probably doesn’t even remember it) sitting mesmerized in front of the tv, marveling at the clarity of the picture and how amazing it was that we didn’t have to ‘go’ to the movies anymore.
It makes me laugh to think about how exciting an innovation this was. It really did change our perception of culture. We never would have gone to as many movies as we ended up watching on the VCR.
So I guess this post is ending up being a nostalgia piece.
What’s Next?
I feel like we’re on the verge of some additional drastic shifts in our lifestyles. The ones I sense coming now have to do more with what we eat and how we plan to sustain life here on Earth – meaning learning how to live far more sustainably and dramatically less wastefully and destructive on our planet.
I wonder what things that exist today, that we use every day and barely think twice about, will become completely anomalous to the babies being born right now.
(T-895)