The New York Times has a good piece about modern communications technology and how it's affected the "communication gap" between deployed soldiers and their relationships at home:
The communication gap that once kept troops from staying looped into the joyful, depressing, prosaic or sordid details of home life has all but disappeared. With advances in cellular technology, wider Internet access and the infectious use of social networking sites like Facebook, troops in combat zones can now communicate with home nearly around the clock.
They can partake in births and birthdays in real time. They can check sports scores, take online college courses and even manage businesses and stock portfolios.
But there is a drawback: they can no longer tune out problems like faulty dishwashers and unpaid electric bills, wayward children and failing relationships, as they once could.
I don't have much to say about the piece itself, but it reminds me of an office conversation from awhile back. Over the last century, even with rapid technological growth, humans have only gotten good at three things: generating wealth, communicating with each other over long distances, and killing each other in huge numbers. For this century, let's see if we can't do a little worse on the latter.
