Transglobal Communication

Posted on 2002/11/20 20:15:55 (November 2002).

Late last night whilst waiting for a train at the station, Chie phoned me on her mobile. What ought to have been a really normal phone conversation was, to me, this kind of wonderful revelation about how amazing the world, and the technology within it, is. It turned out she too was on her mobile, and she too was at a station. As I was leaving London for the night at the end of a day's work, she, the other side of the world, was heading into Tokyo to start her day's work. The other end of that virtual phone line, it was already tomorrow.
I could hear the bustle of Japanese commuters in the background on their way to work, and she could hear the weary trudge of the lateshift of English commuters on their way home. The announcements in one of my ears about delayed trains in English merged with the announcements in the other ear about how well the trains were doing in Japanese. To passers by in Japan, tiny bits of an automated train announcement system the other side of the world, in another language, were filtering into their subconcious. Digital signals with this mixture of messages, this ebb and flow of multilingual information floated off into the night sky and scattered through the EM spectrum. Maybe it's just me, but I thought this was pretty amazing.

I feel so much happier now I undesartnd all this. Thanks!

Posted by Ireland at 2011/06/21 13:15:47.

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