1 Story From Personal Experience
There’s almost a human like connection that can be made when you are on a phone call with another human being. You can hear how they are saying things. You can tell if there happy or sad, mad or glad. The inflection in their voice can tell you if they are tired or alert.
Text Messaging, while convenient has lost a lot of what makes calling great. We replaced a lot of the emotional expression found in phone calls with emojis, gifs and memes. Poor substitutes for the connection we got over a phone call. True that in-person conversations were even better at allowing more intimate 1:1 interactions, anyone who has been on a blind date before knows that. But then enter the video call, is it the best of both worlds?
I remember back in the day Nickelodeon would do video phone calls with their contestants and if they answers some trivia correctly they would get a new Sega Game Gear. They literally had to be sent an ATT Video Phone to receive the call and they were broadcasted to the whole Nickelodeon audience. The Video was so choppy you could barely tell there was an actual person on the other line. I still thought it was the coolest thing ever because it represented a future I wanted to be part of, being able to video chat other people.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate phone calls way more than the next guy. Everyone’s feelings about phone calls have been tainted by the amount of robocalls bumping around out there. But I wouldn’t mind a call from a good friend or favored relative once in awhile to catch up, something I never receive nowadays, I only ever get calls from my Mother. The advent of Social Media has given just enough of a person’s life updates that we forget that 1:1 communication has always been one of the key ways us humans have connected with each other. So give that person you’ve been thinking about a Phone Call, I guarantee they’ll answer, or at least they call back if you left a legitimate voicemail.
2 Ideas from Me
Video Game History is important to me, it’s a really fascinating subject. It’s basically Art History and should be reserved as such. Problem is, unlike books and actual art, it’s hard to display properly, given the amount of emulation and legal issues with copyright and other problems. We should figure out an exemption, maybe given to a nonprofit in a way that we can have video game museums in many cities. I’ve been to a couple and they are great, but more needs to be done to save a lot of the history and stories behind your favorite classic video games.
Airbnb disrupted the Hotel Industry, but to tell you the truth, I prefer a Hotel. I need a Hotel Pass, like MoviePass but set a number of nights per year I can use wherever the hotel chain is. This sounds like a Timeshare, but without the thousand of dollars spent on that stupid maintenance fee where they make their real money.
3 Quotes from Others
”The day will come when the man at the telephone will be able to see the distant person to whom they are speaking.”
-Alexander Graham Bell
"When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us."
-Alexander Graham Bell
"The only difference between success and failure is the ability to take action."
-Alexander Graham Bell