Reflections: Communication
The way we talk to one another has rapidly changed in the last few decades, connecting people across the globe much more closely than before.
A few days ago, I got a phone call from our daughter. From Denmark. On something called “WhatsApp.”
She and her family are there for a sabbatical semester, and she was just calling to say hello. And while I was delighted to hear from her, I’m part of a generation not so used to the instantaneous communication that exists these days.
When I was in college in the 1960s, I’d speak to my parents on the phone every couple of weeks, usually on a Sunday, when long-distance rates were cheaper, and never for more than a few minutes. We paid by the minute and didn’t want the call to cost a fortune.
Later in the 1960s, when I was in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, I learned from a letter that my mother was seriously ill. I wanted to be in touch, and so I arranged for a phone call.
That meant leaving the island of Leyte on an overnight boat, with chickens and baby pigs sleeping under my cot on the deck. Arriving at the island of Cebu, I had to take a taxi across the city to get a small ferry boat — a landing vessel left over from World War II — to the neighboring island of Mactan, where there was an American military base. Once inside the base, I had to find the communications office, and request that the officer on duty allow me to make a call.
This wasn’t an ordinary call, either. It was by short wave, which went out halfway across the world to the United States, in the hope that someone there would respond, and that person there could patch the call into my parents’ phone.
The system worked! I reached my folks, but we couldn’t talk normally. I had to talk, then say “Over” while pushing a button to allow them to talk, and after they were through, they had to do the same. This pattern went on and on.
It was clunky, but we talked for 10 to 15 minutes, enough to assure me that my mother was going to be all right. Then, the call was done.
All I had to do now was to spend the next 15 hours in Cebu, embark on another overnight boat trip back to Ormoc, and hope I could get some sleep.
Things had gotten a little better about 20 years later, when I was teaching in Finland for a year. I had been on the faculty at Yale and was looking for a tenure-track job on my return. I was in Norway, due to give a guest lecture one evening, but the day was free, and my host suggested that we go hiking in the mountains around Bodǿ and Nesna before my talk. After a wonderful day hiking, as we approached the venue for my lecture, someone from the hotel stopped us, and told me that I had an important call from the United States. I had to wait a couple of hours, until my lecture was done, but then returned to the hotel, made the call at midnight on the only phone with an international line, reached the Dean at the University of Oregon, and learned that I was being offered a job that I really wanted.
Like virtually everyone else in this country and the world, I now have a cell phone — an iPhone for me and many others, and the equivalent for others. And I love having the access it provides, which makes life so much easier.
At the same time, during my years of teaching here at Miami, I often wondered about the helicopter parents who were in touch with their kids — my students — four and five times a day. I wondered if that was a good thing.
But then, I would stop myself. While the constant communication of today may feel overbearing at times, I realize that it’s a whole lot better than having to take 2-3 days to make a single call.
Allan Winkler is a University Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Miami University, where he taught for three decades. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press.
