The 21st Century Matriarch

As I was growing up, letter writing was the primary way people communicated long distance. Telephone calls were still comparatively expensive – primarily for emergency type communication. Letter writing was something we learned in school and I had at least one long distance friend to hone my skills….and I wrote to my parents when I was away (at camp, for example). Postcards were less expensive that letters, but I usually wrote letters.

For local type communication, the telephone was the main path. Most of our phones had rotary dials although the push button phones began to take over during the 60s; they were all ‘land lines,’ of course. There was only one phone in our house for most of my growing up years, so there was no privacy for conversations; that became troublesome during my teens.

These days we no longer have a land line. Almost all people (except young children) have their own cell phone. The devices are still phones…but there is a lot of communication via text (and occasionally email) using the same device. I have stopped sending letters and cards entirely. Some of the multi-person type communication (like my neighborhood or my high school class) is done through social media groups rather than mailed newsletters.

There are times I wonder if non-profits have kept up with these shifts…there are a few that still send note cards as an incentive to contribute. I have been putting them in a donate pile…but maybe they should go in recycle instead.

Previous Then and Now posts

As I look at old books (on Internet Archive), the images of bridges always catch my attention. Why is that?

Perhaps I see them as a historical connection leading to social media of today….driven by our desire to communicate faster and to more people. Constructing bridges still helps us get from one place to another (usually over water); we do not think of the communication aspect of bridges so much anymore because there are so many other ways we can communicate; however, if there is a bridge destroyed by war or shut down by structural failure/renovation, we again become aware of how critical bridges are in our lives. Historically, as more durable bridges than a log across a stream were constructed…and longer bridges that could span a bay or connect islands to a continent…they must have resulted in cultural shifts locally. Were they as profound as the ones we experience now with social media? If so, the scale was smaller. Maybe there were some that realized the faster and broader communication is not always better…..that communication can foster division as well as consensus.

Or maybe they are symbols of our need to modify the world to meet our needs. We don’t always think through the impact of a bridge…the enabler it is to further development. For example, consider a bridge to a barrier island; that implies a road on the barrier island and then maybe beach houses or high-rise hotels with associated water and sewer infrastructure…dune and beach erosion, problems for structures when the island naturally wants to erode and rebuild.

Bridges are functional forms of art. They reflect the structural prowess of architects/engineers and the aesthetics of the culture and location where they are built.

Enjoy these pictures of bridges from some books I’ve browsed recently!

Siren, Osvlad. Histoire des arts anciens de la China vol.4 L'Architecture, 1930.