The ebb in the yuletide

This story should interest you. It is about the flow and the ebb of time. A couple of days ago, as of this writing, I made the rounds of some department stores in Ikeja and Victoria Island, Lagos. I wanted to feel the flow of the tide in the yuletide. I have to report that […]

This story should interest you. It is about the flow and the ebb of time. A couple of days ago, as of this writing, I made the rounds of some department stores in Ikeja and Victoria Island, Lagos. I wanted to feel the flow of the tide in the yuletide. I have to report that I only felt the ebb, not the flow, in the tide. People of my generation, the analogue generation, would lament this to no end and to no avail. So, let me tell you what technological advancement has done to the yuletide and everything before and after. Take it as an ode in prose; not the lamentations of an analogue baba.

This important festive season in Christendom has become sterile. And that is putting it kindly. Much of the fun has been taken out of it. The fun of shopping; the fun of family gathering; the fun of sharing when we send out greeting cards expressing our goodwill to family and friends. All gone with no hope of being recaptured. If progress looks back, it is frozen in salt.

Remember when the arrival of the Christmas season was welcomed with the arrival of greeting cards and hampers and turkeys? You could find a pile of hampers in important offices and homes. Some of them would remain unopened well into the new year. And the turkeys would roam in their new but strange environment, blissfully unaware of what December 25 had in store for them.

Well, in the stores, I saw some expensive-looking hampers. I saw no one checking them out. And I saw not one hamper passing through the gate of no return, the checking out counter. You do not need me to tell you what that meant, of course. The fun is gone out of the exchange of hampers.

Remember when the receipt of the Christmas cards excited so much joy in the family? Well, no one sends them any more. You see, life is about change and progress. They bring good things and not-so-good things. The internet and the mobile phone are great technological advancements in human communication and social interaction. We cherish them. They have further reduced the world from a global village to a mere market square in our villages. Nothing beats the ease with which we communicate our folks in the villages. And nothing approaches the revolution in information dissemination and retrieval like the internet. Ancient and current history? All there with the click of the mouse.

But here is the reverse side of that beautiful coin. The mobile phone has killed the Christmas greeting card business. Shops no longer stock them because no one buys them. Believe me, my heart goes out to the young artists who once made a good living designing personalised Christmas cards but are now reduced to staring, brush in hand, at the palette. Their job has been taken over by the text message capability in our mobile phones. I can understand if they are quietly cursing the inventors of the mobile phone and its soft wares. They are enemies, obviously.

The ubiquity of the text message is simply overwhelming. At the beginning of each new month, text messages wishing us well in the new month, descend on us with the grace of nuisance. Ditto at festive seasons, sacred or mundane. These messages elicit immediate response from the recipients, thus denying us the fun of waiting for delayed reciprocation and appreciation.

The first victim of the text message is letter writing. This was a cherished art in which men and women poured out their hearts and love to one another. No one writes letters any more. We send text messages instead. The text message is an extended telegraphese. But its beauty, such as it is, is that it does not even have to be grammatical. It cannot be used to express profound thoughts and feelings such as flow only out of the tip of the biro or the fountain pen. It is all business, stark, to the point but devoid of human feelings.

I have often wondered how young people, the profound digital generation, express their love and feeling for each other. How do you woo a girl with a text message? It is a mystery I do not wish to know or explore. If it means a sterile world for them, served them right. At least it would help to moderate their poking fun at the analogue generation.

The intrusion on our world by the text message has greater implications on personal and social history than you might imagine. It impoverishes human history. Historians cannot retrieve text messages to reconstruct the life and times of great leaders. If Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson had used text messages and twitters, we would never have known anything of their private thoughts so well and so humanly expressed in their letters. Would we have known what Jefferson thought about newspapers? They have gone but we still hear their voices in those letters carefully preserved in their libraries.

Perhaps this is one good reason why you should pity President Donald Trump and his passion for the twitter. He is obliterating the path to his place in history. When he is done with wrecking his country with the twitter, no one would know his private thoughts on governance and what he strove to do to find some space on the bench history reserves for such men and women. Because the twitter, like its cousin, the text message, has no place for profundity of thoughts.

I have always known that in the relentless klump, klump march of human progress, some of the things we once held dear are lost. Civilisation exacts stiff prices on the civilised. Something always gives. Here is a brief inventory of what we have lost to the digital intrusion: Christmas cards, Christmas turkeys, Christmas hampers, letter-writing and intimate human interaction. Sad victims of the text message, the mobile phone and the information super highway, the internet.