Radio personalities Randy and Spiff, on Atlanta’s Oldies 106.7, helped me endure the metro traffic woes earlier this week with a bit about things that are disappearing.
Callers came up with all kinds of things like printed photos, daily newspapers, landline and pay phones, and bound volumes of encyclopedias. That latter one took me down memory lane.
Googling up an unlimited supply of resources on a subject was not an option in the schools days many of us experienced. Whenever a writing assignment was due, I would call out: “Mom, I’m going over to the Medleys to borrow ‘D’ (or whatever volume of the World Book Encyclopedia was needed for the topic at hand).”
During the morning show bantering about things that are disappearing, one caller offered: “Talking to people.”
There was laughter, but then a pause. It was the realization that what the caller said was, well, sadly true.
Texting, Facebooking (to make yet another noun into a verb) and whatever evolving forms of communication are wonderful ways to keep in touch and cross miles. But eyeball-to-eyeball, voice-to-voice conversation should be taken off the endangered of extinction list.
Director of the Jesus Worldview Initiative at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee and former executive editor and publisher at Good Faith Media.
