Untethered in Paris | Blatant Berry
How did we survive with such sparse communication? By John N. Berry III Jul 15, 2011The experience was exhilarating and also rejuvenating. I was alone, sipping Pernod at the café Les Deux Magots. My sidewalk table faced the Boulevard Saint-Germain and an intersection named for Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. My cellphone didn’t work in France, and I had left my other digital tools at home. I was unconnected, unreachable, injoignable in a foreign land, sitting where the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, even Woody Allen had sat. I was untethered in Paris.
I spent four afternoons of our tourist week in that grand city that way, watching the Parisians stroll by, contemplating the accursed questions, and, of course for anyone my age, reflecting on how it was when we were young, long before the digital age had begun.
The big events in my predigital youth were shared the old-fashioned way. We communicated much less frequently, mostly by what they call snail mail now. For the world-changing events, like Franklin Roosevelt’s day of infamy speech after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the family gathered around the big hardwood radio cabinet by the fireplace to listen to the President. A death in the family was usually reported by telegram, or that expensive rarity, a long-distance telephone call. Birthdays were observed by snail mail, too, a greeting card with a personal note on the back, and in our family we tried to find funny ones. If we couldn’t gather to feast on the major Christian holidays, we would plan via snail mail another long-distance call, then we’d all gather around the phone to wish faraway relatives a happy holiday.
We used the more expensive, faster electronic (I guess they were “electric” then) communications tools for the vital crises—serious illness, death, urgent calls for help or money—or to announce or celebrate good news like an engagement, a graduation, a new job or a big promotion, a public honor received, or what have you.
The Pernod afternoons gave me an exciting artificial glimpse of being unconnected and unreachable. I wondered how we survived on such sparse communication and inadequate contact with one another. By the second Pernod on the last Paris afternoon, I began to want to communicate with colleagues, friends, and loved ones. “I could croak out here, and nobody would know,” I mused.
My ruminations made me want to share insights, discuss issues, hear about what was going on in the world. More urgent, I wanted the security and comfort of knowing my cellphone was at hand to call medics, reassuring relatives, and supportive comrades.
Most of my younger associates also are in the library and information profession. Many are students. Being much older, I have often jokingly ridiculed their passionate enthusiasm for all the new technology, especially each new social networking space that came along. I realize now that these new tools provide for them not only easy access to one another but also exciting new ways to learn, to serve, to inform, and to propose action to improve their lives and communities.
For too many years I have avoided becoming engaged with them in the exploitation of these communications and information tools. My habits and career were too deeply rooted in past methods to understand the immense liberation of thought and creativity that these new tools have unleashed.
It may be too late for me to catch up with them now, but I am going to try. After all, the most important reason all these new tools were created is to help us to understand one another and our world better. That small insight was the reward and the lesson of a few quiet afternoons untethered in Paris.
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John N. Berry III (jberry@mediasourceinc.com) is Editor-at-Large, LJ |
Photo credit: CC by ingo.ronner
