Wireless, typewriters and cigars…those were the days

Let us step back 40 or 50 years. Mr Jones, husband and father of a household, is hurrying home from work at 5.30pm on a week night and hears the shouts of ‘extra extra!’ from a boy selling the evening newspaper as he is on his way out the tube station. 

Mr Jones pays tuppence for a paper, partly out of interest and partly because it was made so readily available on his way out the station. He would skim the paper from front to back during the journey home, gasp at a few stories and ponder the world issues for ten minutes or so, then he would arrive home, drop it onto the kitchen table and the insight into the rest of the world would be gone and forgotten.

That is it. That was the extent of a person’s news intake 50 years ago. Alternatively, people would actively tune into a television channel at 9 or 10pm to watch a robotic broadcast of the news. Prior to the launch of television, it was a case of tuning into wireless for the daily news. How very quaint, you say.

It was a recognised effort; a conscious decision to seek out information. Either way, the fact that it was always a matter of choice is the essential aspect and is one of the main differences from the lifestyles of today.

In the 21^st century a plane makes an emergency crash-landing into the Hudson River and the first alert made is through some random onlooker uploading a photo from his iPhone onto Twitter.

Janis Krums took this photo and uploaded it onto Twitter some 15 minutes before mainstream media got wind of this news. His Tweet (“There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy”) created one of the greatest media storms in history.

It is difficult to take in the full force of this concept. The online revolution, of which Twitter is a fast-growing branch, is difficult to fathom when we consider the ground journalism has covered in the past ten years alone.

The mass media of the current time is a continuous, unrelenting bombardment of news. With the revolution of the internet, we live in an era where it is more difficult to escape the news than to seek it out.

Logging onto your computer, signing into Twitter, turning on your iPhone, switching between the multiple TV channels – the means by which news can be accessed is endless. How has that affected us as people?

My Mum told me how Pathe news was something of a novelty when she was young. Snippets of news were shown before a film at the cinema, a medium which was used for propaganda during the war. Imagine this happening today? I know my first thought would be ‘no, not this again! I see this enough everywhere else in my life!’

I’m not denying the advantages of the access we now have, but does it not make us more stressed and divided than the people who lived 50 years back? There were no messages, alerts, emails and updates to be answered, no constant stream of breaking information.

The very format of sites like Tweetdeck, Mento, and Addict-o-matic would have been incomprehensible to people living in these times. It is not just a case of understanding technology, it is an attitude change. It requires a lifestyle upheaval. Suddenly, you have to care all the time.

There is no time to stop, escape, throw the newspaper down on the kitchen table and forget about it. News is breaking all around us and everybody wants to be the first to hear about it.

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