Wall Street Journal (July 15)
“India’s state-run telephone company delivered its last telegram on Sunday. We are told an era is ending, as if mankind’s desire to communicate isn’t ageless.” For 163 years, telegrams served a purpose in India, but e-mail, SMS and Twitter are increasingly filling the need. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited had been losing approximately $23 million annually on telegrams since volume dropped to 5,000 daily “from 160,000-odd before smart phones and email.” In the U.S., Western Union eliminated telegrams in 2006 for similar reasons. Ironically, the short Twitter format of “140 characters pushes the limits of verbosity in a telegram,” but of course at greater speed and zero cost.
Tags: Cost, E-mail, End, Era, India, Smart phones, SMS, Speed, Telegram, Telephone, Twitter, U.S., Volume, Western Union
Time (August 16)
Mobile phones have rapidly transformed our lives. “It is hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones. Not the knife or match, the pen or page.” We have grown “accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips. A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon. In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.”
Mobile phones have rapidly transformed our lives. “It is hard to think of any tool, any instrument, any object in history with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones. Not the knife or match, the pen or page.” We have grown “accustomed to having all knowledge at our fingertips. A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon. In many parts of the world, more people have access to a mobile device than to a toilet or running water.”
Tags: Apollo 11, Knowledge, Mobile phones, Smart phones
