What With This Speedy World And All?
We are living through the fastest and most massive shifts in social communication and way of life in human history.
I was born in 1970, just over half a century ago, in Prague, Czech Republic, which was then part of the Soviet bloc behind the Iron Curtain. It was 25 years after the end of World War II, and 2 years after the Soviet invasion of my country.
Our house was one of the first to have a telephone (and television, for that matter). But outside you had to go to a phone booth, insert a one crown coin, and fish the phone number either from your memory or from a phone directory — then dial it on a rotary dial which was filthy and worn out by thousands of previous users. The booth smelled of urine and other nostalgic odors. Today, I do not even need to touch my phone to make a call from my bed. I don’t need to make a call and (as preferred by many of my introverted soulmates) send messages instead. I could start an affair with a person I have never seen, without ever getting out of bed, if I was so inclined. As a child, I had no way to tell my parents I would be late if there was no phone nearby, and that was okay. Today, I fall into a panicked frenzy when my children forget to write that they are safe and they don’t respond. When we lived in Bulgaria, and wanted to make international calls to our family back home, we had to go to the post office, pass the desired phone number to the bad tempered operator, and wait until she called our name; then we would go to a booth with an assigned number and made a quick and intermittent phone call.
I used to be big into letters, both writing and receiving them, old-fashioned letters on six pages with marks to show where the text continues. There are still big boxes of them under my bed in my parents’ house. Now, I don’t remember the last time I wrote one. But wait a minute, that is not quite true; I did write to Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian human rights opposition activist, shortly after his imprisonment in the spring of last year, following his outspoken protests against Putin’s war in Ukraine. I wrote to his prison address in Moscow, expecting nothing. But then I received his old-fashioned hand-written answer in September, which was full of strong resolution and hope, in English on one side and Russian on the other. I posted his powerful letter on my social media page — and only a few days later it was retweeted by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a prominent Russian opposition leader in his London exile, reaching hundreds of thousands of his followers. Such is the power of social media nowadays.
In my youth, writing was a privilege. Someone who presented their text to the general public, be it a novel or a column in the paper, was by default a person who was erudite, and his/her conclusions made sense. Somehow, the selection the publisher made for you by vouching for that author meant you knew you were getting the real deal. In the internet era, the unmoderated public domain is not unlike bedlam on speed during snack break, and anyone with a keyboard has access. The sense of the debate is blurred by random rants and insults, or just pure stupidity. I have been called all sorts of names by people I don’t know, people who have never seen me or read any of my books.
And there are more tangible changes. As a child, I used to spend summers in the old house of my great-grandma in the Bulgarian mountains. In the mornings, I was woken by sun-rays shining inside, and the sounds of dozens of cows being taken to the pastures down by the stream. Their bells tolled me out of my dreams, and after breakfast I would follow them down to the stream for a swim with the gang of village kids. My great-grandma is long dead, and there are no more pancakes with wild strawberry jam for breakfast. But gone are also the cows; there is not a single one left in the once-thriving village. The fresh milk from a cow that grazed on yarrow, thyme, and wild mint tastes like forbidden fruit on your palate, and you used to be able to buy it from at least five neighbors. Now the milk gets delivered from a major dairy producer 100 miles away. The path down to the stream is overgrown with tall grass, as nobody walks it anymore, neither cows nor village children. There are either no children in the village left, or they are invisible. The once-typical soundtrack of the mountains — the constant hee-hawing of the donkey — has fallen silent for good. I never thought I would miss that annoying noise.
And do you remember the opening scene of the film Alien (1979)? When the crew of the Nostromo is woken from hibernation on their spaceship, the first thing they do is light up a cigarette. When I used to fly, even in my teenage years, you could choose which side of the plane you wanted — the smoking section on the right or the non-smoking section on the left. At the end of the day it made no difference, the thick cigarette smoke hung at eye-level across the entire plane, making the non-smokers cough, and leaving your clothes and hair smelling like you had spent the night in a bar. Now the cigarette, the once so sexy yet devastating attribute, has been banned not only on planes, but also in pubs, public places, and in some countries altogether.
Do I need to carry on? We all know many such examples of phenomena that changed or disappeared before our eyes. Take a videocassette (VHS tape) for instance — I saw it come and go within 20 years. You can now ask the AI chatbot to write a rhyming poem about a sad cruise missile in the style of Alfred Tennyson, and this is what it spits out in a single second:
In the depths of the ocean blue
There lies a cruise missile so true
But despite its sharp and sleek design
It feels a sadness deep inside
For though it was built for destruction
It longs for a different construction
To glide through the sky with grace
And leave a trail of beauty in its place
But alas, it is doomed to fulfill
The orders of those with a darker will
And so it must carry out its task
Leaving a trail of destruction in its wake
Oh cruise missile, how I feel for thee
Trapped in a world of violence and misery
But though your fate may be grim
Remember, beauty lies within.
So long, poets! We no longer need you, many say — and the same goes for visual artists or architects.
Why, this surely sounds like whining over the good old days when things were real and proper and smelled better. The sentiment drags you to your early days of life when everything was simple and you had no worries and responsibilities. When being woken up by cow bells seemed like the most natural thing, to be taken for granted. Gradually you realize that nothing is forever, perhaps except the proverbial sunrise every morning. Things are whizzing at an ever-growing speed before our eyes, like the Nostromo spaceship darting through cold, dark space.
Nah, this isn’t a lament over the decaying state of the word. We have seen it all before, perhaps just not at such a speed. All that rises must eventually descend. All that is in surplus and excess finds its antithesis in moderation and restraint; a growing speed seeks serenity and calm.
Some damages are irreparable, and some things are gone for good. My great-grandmother’s house is no longer standing, and thinking that telegram communication will make a big comeback is probably foolish, but our children will miss them as much as we miss the hourglass or a quill pen — that is, not at all.
These fast changes are, nevertheless, hard to grasp, yet humans are a unique species and will persevere. What we need, though, is to find something steady to hold onto so that the whirlwind does not sweep us off our feet.
Bianca Bellová is a Czech author of 6 novels and one collection of short stories. She won the Czech national Magnesia Litera award for the Book of the Year and the European Union Prize for Literature for her novel The Lake in 2017, which has been translated into 22 languages, including the English translation by Alex Zucker released in 2022.