Oppressed

Monday, 10 June 2002

Wat did you look at on the radio
before television existed?

An interesting question, posed on a radio show. Charming childlike logic:
  • Look with current knowledge at te past.
  • Erase current inventions.
  • Do not replace them by old things and ways that are now lost.
What remains is a child view of the past, odd and incomplete.

I can't remember a world before television myself. However, I do know that evenings in the jungle are filled with story telling. People are looking at each other.

Ambulant phonecalls

The same kind of questions is conceivable in different forms, for example:

How did you call en route
before the era of mobile phones?

The anser to this question is easy. We had phoneboots everywhere, little green glass houses that accepted quarters. Even the village where I grew up had two of them. Now I fail to locate one in the entire city.

I still know about phoneboots, because I'm from a pre-mobile era. Those who grow up in a phonebootless world can not imagine how to people used to call en route. The past get lost.

Unimaginable future

Parts of the current slip my attention.

I fail to imagine what the future will bring me. To me the world is complete, needs no additions. I don't know what I am missing.

This lack of missing happens now, but is not new. Years ago the Commodore VIC20 was the ultimate computer, with a keyboard, cassette player, joystick and a television for monitor.

I failed to imagine what could be missing. Things such as floppy disks, harddrives, CDs, laptops, palmtops, mouse, GUI, HTML, OO, Java, email and the whole world wide web were yet unknown to me. And so, I did not miss them.

The future was, is and will be unimaginable.
lost past            
 
  unimaginable future
current
present
 
   
     
     
-> tijd

The known current present
is oppressed
between a lost past
and a unimaginable future.

Till next week,
Nut

Born 8 June 2002: Jonno Rick. Congratulations Rob, Laurella, Rianne and Dennis Rolfes Asselman.