(HOST) Keeping in touch with friends and family seems especially important this time of year. And commentator Deborah Luskin has been thinking about how much the technology that makes that possible has changed in recent years.
(LUSKIN) Among the things I remember about the 1964 New York World’s Fair was Bell Telephone’s Picturephone. This was a telephone that would broadcast a live picture of the caller on a small black and white television screen encased in a streamlined, space-aged case. My brothers and I stood in line and tried it out, talking to and viewing each other from either end of the pavilion. We laughed about it all the way home, making jokes about what would happen if you answered one of those phones when you weren’t wearing any clothes. Let me say this in our defense: we were pretty young, ranging in age from five to twelve, and the possibility of there being a picture phone that worked was even more far fetched to us than a man ever landing on the moon.
In 1964, we had one phone line in our house, and two phones: one mounted on the kitchen wall and an extension upstairs, in my parents’ bedroom. The kitchen phone had a long cord, which we kids stretched even longer when we pulled the handset around a corner for privacy. When we were teenagers, one of us was always on the phone, except during dinner, when my mother insisted we take the phone off the hook, so that we would not be interrupted at our family meal.
I moved to Vermont twenty years after the World’s Fair, arriving in here before touch tone telephone. In 1984, it was still possible to dial neighbors in my local exchange using only the last four digits of their phone numbers, and I had to talk to an operator to place an out of state call.
That’s now changed. At home we now have touch-tone land-lines, data subscriber lines and an answering machine. In addition, in our household of five, we have five computers, four cell phones and a pager. Granted, we don’t get cell reception at home, but my kids are all over the world. We stay connected by phone, by email, and now by video chat.
One of my kids is currently in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Even in this age of jet travel, Kigali is an arduous thirty-hour series of flights from Boston, if all the connections go right. Sothe other morning, it was with enormous delight that I spoke with my daughter face-to-face, in living color, in real time, from the other side of the world.
The picture phone is here, only it’s not a phone at all; it’s a computer. In addition to video-chatting with my daughter in Rwanda, I video chat with my brother in California, my web designer in Alaska, and with my father, whose hearing loss makes the ordinary telephone difficult for him to use.
It may have taken forty-five years for the picture phone to arrive, but at last, that future is here.