.Live.Laugh.Love.Family..: The Historical Context of Family and Technology

I can’t even begin to imagine what life would have been like for my family when technology wasn’t in the picture. According to an article on BBC, the postal service reached the public in 1635, removing the requirement of travel to spread the news of an engagement, or a recent birth.

By the 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell brought an even larger miracle to families, the telephone. This invention removed the waiting time between letters to know that news has reached your relatives. You might have been married for weeks or even months by the time your cousins and aunts were able to read your letter, and send you a congratulatory card. Even still, Bell’s invention was blown away a mere hundred years later when the first cell phone call was made.

Can anyone else appreciate how incredible of a breakthrough the cell phone was? Once cell phones were in the picture, so many family complications were demolished. No more waiting around when your club got out early and your family didn’t expect to pick you up for another hour. No more panic when you get stranded at the mall and want to spare yourself the embarrassment of going to the help office.

There were just so many ways cell phones improved the quality of life, or at least the difficulties of certain aspects of it. Of course, cell phones also brought on some new issues as well. I remember when I got my first cell phone at fifteen years old. It was a Trac Phone, so it wasn’t really even what I saw as a “real” phone, but it still was an extra $30 a month my family had to pay for. In addition, my younger brother, who was around seven years old at the time, complained more than ever, since whatever I had, he wanted too. My family finally caved when he was eight years old (ridiculous, I know) and I’m sure they regretted it when my brother discovered texting, and racked up a $200 cell phone bill for them to pay for.

Communication between family members has gotten exponentially easier through the years, as things like MySpace (founded in 2003) and Facebook (founded just a year later) took over our world, followed by Twitter shortly after. These new kinds of websites have made all new ways to talk to each other (as well as allowing some mild stalking between siblings, parents and children, etc.).

I love how easy it is to access pictures of the new babies in my family when I’m away at school, as well as how simple it was to follow my sister’s Tweets, but I see how these relatively new ideas of communication are being abused, and causing more issues than when the only interface for communication was writing a letter.

It’s a new world these days where you have to be careful about what you put on your social networks, and what you say in your updates. I remember a few times that friends of mine were confronted by family members at home because of their Facebook statuses, or pictures they had in their online albums. It’s great to be able to keep in touch in such an easy way, but it seems to have gotten to a point where there’s newfound lack of boundaries and privacy that we need to protect each other from.

It’s one thing to show your family the things that are going on in your life, but there comes a time when people need to learn how to adjust their settings, and other ways to hide the information you wouldn’t want y