All our messages are telegrams now
I was explaining to my son about telegrams, a concept he was aware of only from films. The best way I found to explain it was to liken it to an email in a world where normal communication was by snail mail.
But back when I was a boy, the arrival of a telegram marked a message as urgent in a way that the arrival of an email can never do. There were no spam telegrams, for instance: cost made that impossible as a marketing option. No; telegrams were, for the most part, used to convey information that would change the recipient’s world, however temporarily.
Births, deaths, desertion, enrichment, impoverishment, a sudden change of plans. The arrival of a telegram was noted in the community beyond the immediate recipient. There was a collective intake and holding of breath.
And telegrams, because of a combination of cost and tradition, were short and written in a sort of code, with unnecessary words removed. This was not a long read format. But full stops were always included — as ‘STOP’.
Nobody accepted a telegram from the delivery boy/man and set it aside. A telegram was read instantly.
The telegram flourished, of course, when phones were rare. Strangely, though, they also flourished at a time when the mail service was astoundingly good. In the time of James Joyce’s childhood, for instance, it was possible to post a letter in Dublin that would arrive — and be delivered — in London that same day. I still remember three postal deliveries in a day. Hard to believe when we now have one if we’re lucky. With a postal service good enough to deliver a same-day letter, the telegram’s message assumed even greater significance.
So, telegrams. I got the point across to my son, I think. They were messages that interrupted our lives.
This morning, as I sat writing in a coffee shop, I received a text and, against all my instincts and better judgement, I put down my pen and picked up my phone and read the text. Needless to say, it was not urgent. Few of the messages I receive on my phone are and yet — like many of the people I know — I tend to reach to read it as soon as I see I have received one.
When we let every message interrupt us, how do we apportion importance? When every message demands attention, do we blunt our sensitivity to the message that really should change our world?
Also, a telegram shocked us from outside our echo chambers. Little has the power to do that now when we are so connected, if not to each other, to news of each other and to our chosen sources of news. Perhaps that is a good thing: telegrams probably induced a fair number of heart attacks, after all.
But I can’t help feeling we’ve lost something — not in the redundancy of telegrams per se — but in the almost consistent level of news consumption, whether personal, political, sports, or any other interest you care to mention. The missing telegrams point to our failure to discriminate between the important and the mundane. This failure is one of the reasons we fail to fight against the destruction of our planet and the neoliberal economics that keeps us in thrall.
Imagine a telegram every day telling you the real reasons for the state of the economy and your country’s failing social services. Social media campaigns are good but they have to fight to get the message across amongst cat videos and fake news. And we’re back to echo chambers, where you believe the news because the news tells you what you already believe.
And so we spiral down to destruction with no way to send a telegram to let others know what’s happening.
