Welcome to a new decade, promising ever more technological change!

Here is one change that came to my mind: I remember, as anyone of my generation does, how you used to have to wait more than a year to have a phone line delivered by the state-run phone monopoly of the time. In fact, after I got married in the mid-seventies and waited a couple of years, I got a shared line with my absent-minded neighbor, who would forget to hang up after conversing…

This is now a fading memory; these days, we take it for granted that we can get connected with practically no barriers. The competition in the telephony business means that providers are bending over backward to give us access: one of my acquaintances just had a new voice-over-Internet telephone line delivered in less than a day by his Internet provider. And when he decided to cancel it, it took two days of phone calls and endless waiting for “the next available agent” to get rid of this line. It is now easier to get a telephone than it is to remove it!

This actually has serious implications for Information Overload: I wouldn’t go back to the old system, but I must observe that with no barriers and negligible costs, people communicate non-stop whether it’s advisable or not. When telephones were a scarce commodity and their use – especially long distance use – was expensive, people thought before picking one up. When international messaging was based on paper mail, and cost postage, people weighed their words. And when instant messaging involved telegrams that cost by the word, brevity was king. Not any more.

Now, if only we could make email cost by the word, or by the addressee…   🙂