Sunday, December 13, 2009

Nostalgia?

I just checked the new posts on the main site, so I'll get to those links after I make this post.

Maybe I'm feeling a bit too sentimental or nostalgic this week, but this story, which I found online and not in print (another telling sign?) made me a bit sad. The New Haven train station is replacing the old school 'Solari' schedule board - the noisy one that manually changes each character until it creates a new message - with an LCD monitor.

I really liked that sound and display whenever I would be waiting for a train there. Each change would create new words out of old ones until settling on the right one. Springfield would turn into SpriHaven before ending with New Haven. It enhanced the character of the station and the mystique of train travel to me. I always found the idiosyncratic mistakes charming too - a misspelling that would take a few extra seconds to correct, a 30 minutes late notice that would switch back to 15 minutes late. (I'm using the past tense because although its still there, it won't be soon, and as I don't plan on doing any train travel in New Haven for the foreseeable future, it might as well be the past to me.)

I know this isn't really related to this class, but I think the greater transition is still relevant. With all this activity going on to replace dying types of communication, what are the implications on the way we live? Have we lost something that can't easily be attained again? I guess this is my end of the semester, end of an era question.

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