real world columns: contact

I’ve just been watching the movie ‘The Graduate’, for about the seventh time. Highly enjoyable and thought provoking, and this time there was a thought provoked about media and communication. In the movie, the parents of the romantic young man and woman have their own plans for them and decide that they should not see each other any more or have any other sort of contact. In that era it would not be too difficult, it would just be a question of turning them away if they called at the door, hanging up on them if they rang and intercepting letters brought by the mail man. There were few ‘gates’ of communication and the parents were gate-keeper to them all.

Nowadays that has changed. The increasing spending power of average Western individuals coupled with the decreasing costs of technology means that parents are no longer the gate-keepers of the communication channels. Indeed, all to often, the younger generation have more access than the parents. (‘Hey! Mom. I’m sending an email to cousin Jenny, is there anything you want to say to her Mom?’). Furthermore, the technological gates themselves are more discrete and more portable. It used to be the front door and the fixed point telephone. Now it can be the mobile phone in the bedroom, the SMS message in the garden, email at the internet cafe, ICQ at work.

As well as more channels of contact, the new technologies have meant that it is easy to maintain contact after a chance or casual meeting with someone. Exchanging telephone numbers is very difficult without a pen and a piece of paper. Occasionally, if I’m with a group of people I’ve tried the approach of allotting two figures per person, but it never seems to work. However, email addresses can be easily memorized, and if you know where the person works and what their full name is you can even take a fairly good guess at the email address.

Nowadays, new technology is often responsible for that chance meeting in the first place. You can search for old friends on the internet, in chat groups you can chat to people with similar interests (think of the movie ‘You’ve Got Mail’), ICQ offers a random chat facility and there is a new WAP ‘blind date’ service being launched in the UK where you can enter a personal profile, and as your WAP phone is aware of where you are, you can be put in touch with someone with a matching profile in the same vicinity.

This idea has been around for a while but only now does it seem to be taking off, mainly because it does not require buying special dedicated technology. Other contenders have been the Japanese ‘love-getty’ a rather less discerning version that just used to beep when you got within 10 meters of someone else who had one of the things. The consumer electronics company Philips also had the visionary idea of ‘hot badges’. Somewhere in between the two mentioned above, hot badges were badges that could be profiled and would alert you if you came in the vicinity of someone with a matching profile.

To some extent this opening up of communication gateways and their adoption by the younger generation is a revolution comparable with the role of the car in the fifties. All of a sudden teenagers then had a private space that was their own, outside the scope of their parents’ space and where they could meet other boys and girls. The sort of set up that was typified in the movie ‘American Graffiti’. This has meant that today there is a certain generation that is used to hearing their parents saying, ‘Oh yeah, your father and I used to drive down to the lake together in his ‘56 Chevy.’ Maybe with the current contact revolution there will soon be a generation that hears their parents saying, ‘Oh yeah, your father and I used to meet up every week on the z-world chat-zone after we’d connected our 28k modems.’

One final note on the subject of romantic communication. Everyone has an old box of love letters, and you can certainly have romantic phone calls, you can even send romantic emails (as long as they don’t get forwarded around the globe!) and you can be a slave to romantic SMS messages, but has anyone ever carried out a romance using the good old fax machine? I wonder.