The Incredible Shrinking Planet

When I was a child, one of my family's weekly rituals was tuning into CBS News every Sunday to watch a program called Sunday Morning. I recall the show as a kind of hodgepodge that barely exists elsewhere anymore. Everything from world news to television reviews to sentimental pieces from a man who delivered "Postcards from Iowa" were featured.

At this point, it's hard to remember much of the specific content of the program. I tended to focus on the television and cultural reviews, which were time-sensitive and not generally the kind of thing that stays with you for very long. But for some reason, I do remember a lot of the commercials that punctuated the Sunday Morning broadcasts, and what I remember most are the commercials for telephone companies.

This was in the late '80s and early '90s, the days when Ma Bell had thankfully been broken up but before cell phones and the internet had made the phrase "long-distance" seem as archaic as "telephone exchange name" or "rotary dial". Ma Bell's new incarnation, AT&T, was in heady competition with Sprint, MCI, and various smaller companies to get you to switch your long-distance service. And it seemed, at the time, that these companies all made their appeals somewhere between Charles Kuralt's weather forecast and John Leonard's review of the latest movie-of-the-week.

The ads all seemed about the same. Smiling grandmothers were shown talking to grandchildren a continent or, indeed, sometimes a world away. A NASA photograph of the earth from space, or a computer-generated graphic of the same, would come on. And the viewer would be treated to some prattle about how much our planet was shrinking and the world was coming closer together because California could now call New York for a mere twelve cents a minute.

I've thought about that prattle quite a bit lately as I've found myself back in touch with people back home. Last Sunday, I called my parents for the first time from my apartment landline for G_d only knows what outrageous price. It's odd to think how easy it was to make a direct-dial call from Moscow to the Midwest. At one time, telephone service between the Soviet Union and the United States was greatly restricted, but I didn't have to deal with a single operator to make the call.

More to the point, the internet has enabled me to make contact in ways that would have been unimaginable to me when I used to sit in my pajamas and watch Charles Kuralt. A couple weeks ago, I introduced two friends to each other, both teachers. It was a joyful event for me.

The interesting catch was that both of these friends are not in Moscow but in Daegu, Korea--a city I have never visited and expect I never will visit. I made the connection through a three-way e-mail after having bumped into one of these friends on facebook. What a world we live in--introductions can be made from across the globe!