New Communication Technology

Technological developments over the last 200 years have affected the way we understand the world and what we now understand and accept to be rational and reasonable.
Manners and mobile phones have emerged as a topic for debate particularly in relation to whether someone conversing on a mobile phone should be forced to hang up in order to be served in a coffee shop. The question may well not be one of manners in a society that has broken most of the accepted rules, but one of perceived respect. We live in a time poor world where multi tasking is the only way to get through a day. With the ability to converse on mobile phones with people we actually want to or need to speak with in our spare moments, should we instead be expected to be engaging in pointless conversation with strangers who are performing services such as making coffee?
In coffee shops all over people are consuming coffee alone save a voice on the other end of a phone, it’s how we have come to manage our lives and do business and it has been portrayed recently in the media as bad manners. Some media goes so far as to suggest that people on phones shouldn’t be served unless they hang up and give the server 100% attention. Is the reverse true in this situation, does the customer get 100% of the servers’ attention until they receive what they requested? Remember when you and a friend who was physically present were having a conversation and a waiter arrived at your table? In generally accepted terms the waiter would have waited for you and your companion to pause before addressing you, this was accepted as standard manners. It may be said that this is exactly the same situation with the exception that the waiter can only see one person not two, what has changed here is that due to advancements in technology we can now have a meeting with all the same outcomes as a face to face meeting, remotely. The wait staff though is operating in a customer focused business which hasn’t considered the possibility of remote customers and is now ignoring the evidence of a second human and the ensuing conversation to assert their rights before the person his customer and ultimately the person who pays for his wages wants to speak. This phenomenon seems to be occurring because the wait staff is physically present and humans who are present believe they are more entitled to attention than ones they cannot see. But what of the customer bestowing their patronage? Are they now of less value in an establishment if they aren’t with another paying customer and does this mean businesses will have to rethink their statistics on how many customers it’s possible to loose through short sighted service. The failure to acknowledge remote customers could now loose you twice as many customers as you can see. With technological advances in mobile phones allowing us to see the people we are talking to you also now allow us to see items in shops or at auction and buy remotely, it could simply be another case that humans haven’t caught up with technological advances yet.

Film and TV production techniques have changed the way we see the world in another way.
Looking at television over time in terms of war coverage; first sight was gained at the movies in the 40s. It consisted of carefully scripted stories, very specific music and was in grainy black and white. It proudly sported messages of patriotism and stories of overcoming insurmountable odds. This was the use of technology to further societies accepted norms. The techniques employed were employed to give the nation comfort that they were doing the right thing, the most Australian thing in supporting the war effort.
In the 70’s the Vietnam conflict was a stark contrast to what had been the way the war was seen. This time the sentient community made a decision about the validity of war technology had moved on and cameras became much more portable and in response and confirmation the media showed a more brutal, bloody and gruesome scenario only compounded by colour and poor quality footage which entrenched this look as television reality. When we saw casualties we could feel their pain and we knew that the horrors told of by tipsy Granddads at Christmas were far more sinister than we could have imagined.
In the 90s television was slicker and more polished than ever before and money and business were the order of the day. The community wondered how much a war cost us economically both abroad in direct funds and in the ancillary terms of oil and goods. As a result Desert Storm was portrayed as a war of bloodless clinically precise strategic strikes the main and most important result being exploding buildings and graphs showing how fast we would win and what would be saved by this action. As a whole we seemed less interested in casualties and more in the environmental and financial damage we would do undertaking this, subsequently images broadcast were of burning oil wells and abandoned machinery. By the time the Iraq war happened we were oblivious to the reality in reality TV and the depiction of this war had to strike a common theme with viewers to be taken seriously. This was achieved by the use of internet telecasts of and by the people we welcomed into our homes every day on breakfast and current affairs programs we could almost feel what it was like to be there. They showed live fire, some were injured and some even killed, forcing the realisation that war is dangerous and reinforcing the idea that no one wants to live in a place where war is happening thus again we must support the action the government has taken so we remain at liberty. The way we have communicated war over time has changed with the aide of technology, moreover the viewing audience has changed so that the real task for technology is to support the presentation of this in a way that compels us to be compelled.

Bibliography:
Bordewell,Thompson, ‘Film Art an introduction’ McGraw Hill, New York:, 2004
“New Communications Technology” readings, Griffith University, 2006. http://www.econnect.com.au/pdf/quicktips/mobile.pdf 3.41pm 12th January 2007
“Look whos talking, mobile phone etiquette” Louise Ralph, Econnect communication 2002 http://australianit.news.com.au/articles Accessed 4.44pm 12th January 2007 http://au.messages.yahoo.com/news/top-stories topic “Mobile phone rudeness” accessed 1.30pm 13th January 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II Accessed 8.06am 17th January 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Vietnam_War Accessed 10.16am 15th January 2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Storm Accessed 10.30 am 18th January 2007