A special addendum on the matter of the telephone and its profound influence…
Here’s the program — no energy for notes, except one: regarding the telephone, I will need to come back to that because I missed the one point that I wanted to make: it was not about the word “hello.” It was about the elimination of privacy and the restructuring of the corporate and community organization of the United States.
Just like the cell phone, in some ways more overwhelming since nothing like this had ever existed before.
I know next week is a long time from now — but try to remember that when you listen. Yes, it changed language…and conversation…but it did EVERYTHING else. I’ll make sure next week’s segment is complete and includes what I went over tonight…it was my main point! The fact that it can cause a word to be popularized is nothing — same as with ChatGPT.
The issue was the way telephone turned everyone into a semi-public being, collapsed space and time, and put the previously inaccessible vice president of a company in Chicago within calling distance of a manager or ordinary employee in Boise, which radically altered the structure of business.
Suddenly they were in the same place, accessible unfiltered. All the manager or employee needed was the vice president’s phone number — easy to get, and a seismic shift in the business environment. So please stand by for telephone part two, one week from tonight.
