When I first moved to Sweden and for roughly a year or so I found myself more or less cut off from ”the latest news.” My Swedish, although improving daily and despite everyone wanting to speak English with me, was a long way from being TV or radio news adequate. In order to avoid total media isolation I therefore arranged for a weekly collection of The Daily Telegraph to be sent to me. This arrangement would nowadays be considered more akin to catching up on history rather than news. No smart phones, no Ipads, no computers, no internet, no Facebook, no emails, no SMS messages, no WhatsApp, no Instagram etc, etc. The one telephone I used at home was connected to the wall by a not very long cable. For my grandchildren` s generation the above must come across as an unthinkable nightmare. All in all I might agree that much has changed for the better since the days of my youth although I wouldn` t subscribe to the nightmare sentiment.
Progress always involves change which is not necessarily the case the other way around, although even progress has its thorns.
The world has shrunk, we are closer to one another than ever before. Newspaper headlines have been upstaged by the internet and social media where on occasion the timelapse between event and report is so minute that we as bystanders become part of the event wherever that event may have occured or however horrific. Today` s young people do not share the snail mail innocence of my youth. They are subjected to the brutal realities of life on their smartphones as the traditional filters of yesteryear in the form of parents, school teachers and main stream media are left on the sidelines.
