Launceston Examiner 16 Jan 1858 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article38990325
Look how slowly news moved in the past.
It wasn’t that long ago we lived without rolling coverage. We only found out events that happened in the rest of the world after the dust had settled. No internets, no twits and no faceblah.
Imagine if news took this long to reach us now! This warning is for the beginning of December 1857, but the article is dated the 16th of January 1858. The attack on Canton was expected over a month ago but the warning only arrived in Australia weeks later.
Many thousands of Chinese came to Australia during the gold rush of the 1850’s seeking their fortune, leaving their families behind. It wasn’t hard to read this article and imagine some poor young man from Canton opening the paper to read this tiny little warning. Piratical atrocities of a frightful kind have been comitted upon your family.
Imagine that young man after reading this news. Even if he sent a letter home that minute he wouldn’t get a reply for months.
We went camping for Easter, and even though we had no mobile phone reception we only had to take the short drive into town to get it. I can’t imagine not hearing from your family and friends for months and then getting this bit of terrible news. Whatever would we do without instant updates?!
I have to agree. There’s a lot wrong with our world but I could never call the ability to communicate a bad thing, no matter how much energy is expended in the manufacture of all these tech goodies.
Remember the days before mobile phones? It wasn’t that long ago the sentence ‘I’m at the shop, do we need milk?’ had never been said!
All these years later I still clearly remember the weekend Stuart Diver was trapped at Thredbo. We were out and about visiting friends and every house we went to had it on TV. Nothing like the rolling coverage of that had been on Australian TV before. I think that event was the end of us finding things out after they had happened and the start of the instant updates.
Wow…I remember that! Seems like a lifetime ago. The world certainly seemed a bigger place, or maybe just further away way back then.
My husband and I rented a cabin for our honeymoon in a small lake community. We would never have been able to stay there at all, let alone for an entire week, had we (I) not sat for days seeking out the one cabin for rent that did not offer any kind of WIFI or internet connection whatsoever. Just the basic television channels. No satellite. It really proves just how much we value our connection to our online lives when people are willing to pay twice as much for accommodations with WIFI as they are for a simple roof over their heads. And I’m not making a value statement – he and I went out every day to steal WIFI from the coffee shop down the road. It just really hit home for us how dependent we had become on our daily fix of status updates. I’ve often tried to imagine, having had a father who suffered (and continues to do) with a serious tech addiction, what my life was like back in the very early days before we had some kind of personal computer and internet connection in my house. I believe I spent a lot of time playing in the pasture with the cows, fishing for bluegill, and setting up forts in the woods. It was a strange, strange time. 😉
We are ridiculously dependant on that sort of stuff now, I am as guilty as anyone. We went off into the bush for the weekend in the caravan, I knew we wouldn’t have any mobile phone reception so my wireless stick wouldn’t work but that didn’t stop me from taking my laptop anyway, pathetic! I wasn’t the only one, man of the house took his laptop as well, we just couldn’t be separated from them!!
We were laughing at ourselves though, we know we are pathetic, so it is ok… As soon as we got home I plugged in and checked my blog to see if anyone had read it while I was away. It is like I am totally invalid as a human if nobody looks! Thankfully someone did, I can justify my existence for another week 😉
The funny thing is though that the kids are totally addicted to their hand held consoles and took both their DSi XL’s AND their PS Vita’s so they wouldn’t run out of batteries in one without having a backup. I should have a moan here about kids these days and how screens are taking over their lives but I also packed a new book for them. All I had to do was call out ‘do you want me to read a bit more of the book?’ and they would drop their console and race over. Running out of batteries was not an option as they spent more time running around with the dog or listening to me reading than staring at the screen. I have hope for them!!