Posted by: Contributing columnist, Clarion-Ledger, Business, May 26, 2016
In 1993 I moved to Tokyo to teach English and study 
Japanese. The only Japanese I knew was “Domo arigatto, Mr. Roboto,” so I was looking for an immersive experience. That’s fortunate, because $2 a minute phone calls and the 14-hour time change made it nearly impossible for me to contact my family and friends back in the U.S. I actually started writing letters and faxing them to my parents, who would then fax a response back to me, which shortened our communication time significantly. That became about the only way we could communicate “quickly” without waking each other in the middle of the night.
Forty years earlier, my dad and his older brother hitchhiked from Birmingham to Panama City to spend their summer vacation in Florida. Letters weren’t high on a 19-year old’s priority list, I guess, and they didn’t have a phone. I heard several stories around how his lack of contact with his parents back in Birmingham caused him to miss something because no one could reach him quickly.
Of course, even those letters and occasional calls from a pay phone would have been considered rapid communication over most of human history and clearly history would have been vastly different if communications had been faster. There have been battles fought after wars were over because word hadn’t reached the battlefield. There have been explorers who have been hopelessly lost and “discovered” things that were already mapped. The evolving maps over history have many mysterious features that reflect their limited information, which was basically limited to what they could see.
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Explorers today — and there are still explorers of not only space, but also in oceans and even remote forests — are likely to be streaming high-definition video to teams of researchers back home. Even in the most remote locations, they are still able to connect to loved ones and hear the latest news from around the world. A friend of mine recently hiked to the Mt. Everest base camp, and the only thing that stopped her from posting pictures on Facebook immediately was the cost of a satellite phone, so she posted them a couple of weeks later instead.
This type of connectivity is such a new phenomenon that it’s hard to tell exactly how this is changing the world. It makes the world seem smaller, of course, and I imagine that it’s making the decision to travel to remote or far away locations easier as well. A colleague here at Innovate Mississippi is tracking her daughter’s missionary trip on “GroupMe” — a group messaging app — and can see photos, texts and other information instantly as it is shared among the group. While her daughter is being safely chaperoned by church members, the decision to travel so far away was no doubt made easier by the ability to stay connected.
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Forms of (nearly) instant communications are also changing social norms in a lot of ways. I vividly remember the days of waiting for a group of people at a predetermined spot and wondering where the missing person could be — and having no way to check. That was frustrating, of course, so I’m glad that era is over, but the change in communications makes about half of my favorite 1990’s “Seinfeld” episodes now obsolete. Entire episodes like waiting for someone and wondering what is taking them so long or trying to keep someone away from their house so they can’t check their answering machine are no longer viable plotlines. These episodes will no doubt be looked upon one day as relics of a long-lost society.
I’m glad I spent 1993 and 1994 in Japan; but if I had done it today, I would not have had to schedule weekly phone calls or fax letters. Being instantly connected to family and friends would have completely changed my experience, and I can’t help but think that it would have made the whole experience a lot easier. Based on that, I believe that our instant communications today don’t just enable a connected world, but make it a lot easier for us to explore the world and still feel connected to home. Personally, I hope our technology-connected world also makes the difference in more people choosing to venture far from home.
Tony Jeff is the president and CEO of Innovate Mississippi. He can be reached at tjeff@innovate.ms.