Communication eras

Good evening, the elderly, and yo, the youth. Tonight I thought it'd be interesting to talk about... oh, wait a minute, this is the boring blog. Hmm... why don't I ponder on, say, communication.

I recently noticed that in the short span (at least on the cosmologic scale) of my existence so far, the way people have communicated with each other has clearly changed every now and then, usually following a technological breakthrough. So here's the history, and the present, of communication between the members of the human kind, in a nicely compact form, as observed by me.

1) The prehistory

As I understand it, before the seventies, people communicated mostly by grunting, throwing potatoes at their neighbours and writing tacky love songs to chicks in mini skirts. And centuries ago, there might have been some distinguished poets too, who wrote some love poems or whatever. With a pen made out of a feather.

2) The Kekkonen era

In the countryside, people just walked into their neighbours homes, sat on the bench and waited to be served some coffee. Then they might have talked a bit, if the coffee was good enough. Letters were sent to relatives a couple of times a year. The telephone was invented, but it was mainly used to ask relatives if the letter had arrived yet.

Music was recorded on LP records, which were large, unpractical and expensive. Kids mostly copied LP records on C-cassettes, if they could afford blank ones, and were lucky enough to know somebody who actually owned some music. The rest of us played with matches, cows made out of pinecones and the popular computer C-64, which required copying games on C-cassettes.

3) Late eighties, early nineties

Sometime later, the CD record was invented. Unfortunately, nobody knew anyone who'd actually seen one.

Popular forms of communicating with other people were passing paper notes in the classroom and barfing on the shoes of the one you were attracted to in the local disco. The telephone continued to be frightening and the letters continued to be infrequent.

4) The doorbell era

The cellular telephone was invented. Anybody who owned one was swiftly kicked in the nuts for being an arrogant yuppie, making it ineffective as a means of communication.

A popular way to communicate was to go to a person's home and ring the doorbell. If they were home, communication could happen, provided that enough beer was brought by the visiting person. Letters were still sent to persons living in other cities, but the amount of beer that could be attached to a letter was insufficient to guarantee any real communication.

An extraordinary means of communication was invented in Finland: by standing up in the sauna and farting on the face of the person next to you appreciation could be expressed and a lifetime bond could be engaged. Lots of communication ensued.

5) The text message era

In the nineties, cellular phones became affordable, and therefore could be owned by regular people. Telephoning still continued to be synchronous, and therefore uncomfortable to some people, except when drunk. However, text messaging, being asynchronous and inexpensive, quickly became widely popular.

In the nineties, personal computers were quite common, but Internet connections were expensive and slow. Therefore computers were mostly used in communication in two ways:
1) Writing a letter on the computer, then saving the document on a floppy disk and sending the disk to the recipient by mail
2) Ringing the doorbell of a computer owner, then playing a two-player computer game with them using the same keyboard (provided that the amount of beer was sufficient).

6) The dotcom era

The Internet connections became affordable. Sending letters via e-mail finally made sending pieces of paper stained with ink through mail obsolete. Chat applications made synchronous communication available through the computer. Synchronous communication still required drunkenness, at least in Finland.

7) The web 2.0 era

The appearance of online communities, like Facebook, made communication easier. You didn't have to know the email address of a person, you could look them up using the search functionality of the community. By blogging you could inform your friends of the recent events in your life, without forcing them to being informed. By doing at least something in Facebook, you could signal your friends and relatives that you are alive.

As a conclusion, the means of communication we have today are plentiful:
a) synchronous, real-time communication (farting on the face, talking on the coffee, talking on the phone)
b) asynchronous communication, provider model (text messaging, email)
c) asynchronous communication, subscriber model (spying on other people in Facebook, RSS).

Political rant

The bourgeoisie. Or the right wing in the political field, whatever you like to call them. I can't understand them. To me, to declare oneself as bourgeois, is about as offensive as to admit to being racist or Nazi. It's as if you'd tell everyone that you like to inflict pain on other people and watch them suffer. It's like declaring yourself as superior to the common people. It's like saying that I'm entitled to own a SUV, you're not, and maybe you can wipe my windshield in the traffic lights but I'll spit in your face and drive over your toes when the light turns green.

It might be just my fault. Maybe I've got it all wrong. It could be that the right wing just has not been able to get their message across to me. It might be that I've just been brainwashed enough by my parents so that I can't see anything good about them. But it's funny, because I think that I should be in their target audience. I'm urban and relatively white collar, but still I don't get their message. But do I even know what they are advocating or am I blinded by my prejudice?

Let's see.... the site www.kokoomus.fi (the web pages of the most popular national right wing party) is as mind-numbingly boring as you'd except from a mainstream political party. The only provocative thing that I can see is a news item about Kokoomus members being active in some kind of church-related election. Yeah, way to lick the elderly conservatives. It seems that I'll just have to compress their political program myself:
1) I'm better than you, because I do (or will) earn more money than you, and therefore more privileged
2) Things should be kept that way, forever. Oh yeah, and my kids are better than you, too.

To me it seems that they're really wanting to preserve class society. Like, we're the factory owners, you're the workers, and we're going to rip you off. I can't understand why anybody who doesn't own at least one factory would vote right wing. But yet large masses of people do. Haven't they realized that, by definition, the masses can't be elite? And, as a result of this logic, the bourgeoisie, who should be a minority, are ruling. Democracy doesn't work. And it's our fault.

To me, the most uncomprehensible thing in the political field is the young conservative. It's an oxymoron of a kind. Like "currently I'm slaving as a clerk at this kiosk (because I'm studying business related stuff), but I'm aiming to be the head of a conglomerate some day, so I'll vote conservative, instead of the party that would like to improve my working conditions". "I'm the future dictator, so I'll support the current dictator, even though he'll probably cut my head off."

But then again, what are the alternatives? I don't know. The left wing does not fill me with trust (0ne youthful candidate is not going to do it). I'm not half swedish or a religious nutcase. The green party might be just a decoy for the urban conservatives, and their best guy just left. Where is the political party with fresh ideas and no past ballast?

Non-voting is seeming to look a like an option here. And maybe some brick-hurling would be in place...