Land's Ends (Partially OT/Personal)

A brief note on slower posting last week, spiced up by a few vintage postcards from England

Dear readers,

posting activity was a tad slower last week due to unforeseen “additional stuff™” that occurs every now and then in my line of work.

Needless to say, these things happen every now and then, cost a lot of time, and eat up my “picture postcard special time”, hence this note will have to do for the time being.

Every time I do take a look at the Erich Sonntag Postcard Collection—these days, its individual boxes are covering most of my office desk space—I do feel a kind of solace that is hard to explain.

Postcards, such as the ones reproduced here, are both very nice to look at “in-between”, especially as they tell stories—however short the text on the reverse of mailed postcards are—of both a time seemingly gone by and, to be honest, somewhat simpler, less hectic times.

You see, back in 1973, which is when the above postcard was mailed, there were no internet, no near-instant media hype, or notions that everything must be ‘splained virtually in real time (no pun intended).

Even more off-topic, I recall the landline at my grandparents’, which was a so-called Vierteltelefon, i.e., a landline shared with three other apartments. You could only call someone if the three neighbours you shared your landline with did not use their telephone at the same time. Needless to say, calls were very short, expensive, and limited to the strictly necessary, qualities that remind me of the early days of cell phone adoption in the late 1990s: text messages were limited to 140 characters and relatively expensive, hence one would merely arrange for, e.g., a time and place to meet; today, esp. when I observe “my” students, they are literally glued to their so-called S.M.A.R.T. devices, and whenever I pass by cafés or the student cafeteria, many continue using these awful devices while they’re talking to each other.

O tempora, o mores, I’m inclined to think, and, yes, this shows my age to a certain extent, but it also speaks to the comparative ultra-slowness of human-human interaction that is characteristic of picture postcards and letters.

To close these ramblings, I wish to cite a few lines from a seemingly equally ancient text I was re-visiting the other day, Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), which contains the following lines in its introduction (pp. 3-4; emphases mine):

A few years ago, General David Sarnoff made this statement: “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value”…There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form. General Sarnoff went on to explain his attitude to the technology of print, saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate, but it had also disseminated the Bible and the thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.

If there’s one thing to add, it might be that the invention of moveable type print around 1450 was, at first, used virtually exclusively for bibles and other very relevant texts. It wasn’t before further refinements made prices per book plummet when Europeans made it to the stage when “print caused much trash to circulate”.

This, by the way, is the same trajectory the commercialisation of the internet took after 1997, and it holds up very well to the introduction of cell and later S.M.A.R.T. phones. What social media does today is the equivalent of these McLuhanesque musings with respect to moving images (think: TikTok, SnapChat, and the like).

In closing, this brings me to ponder how mankind might escape the trivialisation of content, which is followed by the crapification of content to a degree that speaks of decadence and decay (think online pornography by average people).

I suppose we must speak more about morality, values that might counter these notions, and, of course, individual responsibilities, with the latter being particularly important as the past generation of hyper-individualism, entitlement, and the showering of privileges for ever-newer and “aggrieved” groups signifies both a watering down of especially individual responsibility and the “outsourcing” of consequences to an otherwise disinterested second (private businesses) or third party (government agencies).

I suppose that the calm and beauty of simply watching the waves roll in, as shown in the above postcard, might go a long way to restoring sanity and, yes, a truly human dimension to our otherwise very much Baudrillard-esque Hyperreality™.

Less rambling postings to follow suit, but I would really appreciate your thoughts on my above musings.