Photo from Instagram This is Cagliari
Starting today, city telephone booths will be decommissioned. But do you remember when you had to search and wait to call and do many other things? There was a time that ended with the advent of first cell phones, and then smartphones, in which, in order to do something, you had to SEARCH (and WAIT).
Photo from Instagram This is Cagliari
Look for a phone booth if you want to talk to someone (namely, on a home landline phone, provided that someone was at home), look for a book, an encyclopedia, a dictionary if you want to understand or find out the meaning of a word or phenomenon, the exact point where there was a country or city, translation from a foreign language, search for a store to buy an item, clothes, food.
The search also included the concept of waiting, because when you found the aforementioned phone booth, you often didn’t have tokens, coins, or cards in your pocket, and you might even have to queue up before picking up the phone, or if you had a dictionary. or an encyclopedia at home, before restoring the information we needed, we had to turn over countless pages and coordinate the movement of the finger-neuron, and if we needed to buy some item, get up from the chair / sofa, leave the house and leave! to new horizons.
Did all this remind you of anything? If you were born before the year 2000, you must have experienced these moments, because then, at a certain point, everything changed. Mobile phones and smartphones with internet access and a simple tap on Amazon have changed everything. And it’s not just the supposed comfort or speed of the game: they have changed the perception of reality. Because now you can no longer wait to do something, whatever it is: now everything needs to be done here and now.
But are we sure that having everything at once is useful? For some things, probably yes: medicine, emergency supplies, the ability to communicate in real time if you have a problem. But for everything else? How satisfying was it to complete one of the “missions” I wrote about above after hard work? Because today it seems that everything is a bit like winning a marathon or any other sports competition without preparation, being at the finish line, having arrived there on an electric scooter, and not on your own feet, without even fully understanding how you got there.
“Hic et nunc” was spoken by the Romans, and they could never have known that the phrase attributed to Horace would become a real way of being two thousand plus years later, when arrival is more important than travel.