I was getting my weekend fix of Bugs Bunny yesterday. Saw the episode “High Diving Hare,” with Bugs and Yosemite Sam. Quick story line. Bug is running a vaudeville act. His star performer is Fearless Freep. Yosemite Sam is a big fan of FF, so he buys a lot of tickets. FF doesn’t show. YS gets mad. Bugs gets the best of him. As always.
But it’s the way that Bugs learns of the no-show that is key to the conversation here. He gets a telegram. Yes, a telegram. Bugs is timeless, but it’s also dated. Another episode on the DVD had a game at the Polo Grounds…
Quick. When was the last time you got a telegram? Or used a pay phone? Can’t remember? Join the club.
Coincidentally with the Bugs marathon on the DVD was a story in our Sunday business section on the collapse of the pay phone and telegram industries. They’re essentially gone, replaced by cell phones, email, text messaging etc.
They join the growing heap of technology—floppy disks, cassette tapes, video tapes—that once seemed vital and now seem quaint at best. Most technology is transitional. Sometimes the transition is just so slow that you can’t see the transition happening. But it is. Whether with the automobile, the telephone or the ways that people get their news.
Good read: Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time. This is a fascinating look at the people who stayed in the Dust Bowl rather than joining the migration to the west that John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
Ken:
Although the Western Union telegram ceased to exist Jan. 27 it lasted much longer than eight track tapes, Beta Maxes and the Pony Express. The first telegram was sent in 1844, what would become Western Union was created in 1851 and named that in 1856. So it lasted almost 155 years. From the 1920s until the 1960s about 200 million telegrams were sent annually. In 2005 there were 20,000. Another icon bites the dust.
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