Virtual-Meet George Jetson

You may have seen that today is supposedly the day that George Jetson was born – he was 40 years old in 2062 when the show was set.

In honor of his birth, I tried to track down a paper I wrote in my mass media technology class at Ole Miss over a quarter century ago and don’t think I’ve read since – “Elroy and the Really Small TV: ‘The Jetsons’ as a Nondystopian Future as a Context for Modern Mass Media Technology and Sociological Impact” – and succeeded, kind of. (In opening the old MacWrite file, bits of it got lost.)

The paper analyzed what the real-world impacts might be of the communication and media technologies shown in The Jetsons.

It’s fascinating how many of the technologies actually do exist now – a screen in your car that lets you tell the radio what song you want to hear and gives you personal traffic information – but my favorite part is my analysis of what it would be like if people really could make video calls at work:

“In real life, it is probably unlikely that this sort of communications system would be used for asking someone to come to face to face meeting; the convenience of simply holding conversations over the screens would probably be overwhelming.

“This could result in a decrease in personal contact in the workplace, not only through reducing the necessity to actually go see people, but also simply through eliminating encounters with others just walking from one place to another.”

“…Another issue brought up by this type of innovation is privacy.”

Not bad, teenage me. Not bad at all.

Ground Control to Major Cool

I had a great time this week at the International Space Station Research & Development Conference, my first big conference since supporting ISS work at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Our team was part of a larger NASA booth at the conference, and brought an amazing exhibit – a camera in the booth could be used to take pictures that were then transmitted to a laptop aboard the Space Station, allowing booth visitors to take a picture of their face in space!

It was so cool to get to see my picture on the space station (and Rebecca and Owen and Joel!), but even better – while helping in the booth, I got to upload files to the Space Station!

It was surreal that I got to do that, but it’s an incredible testament to how amazing the systems are that the Marshall ISS operations support team has developed, that I could go in a matter of minutes from “I know nothing about this” to “I’m actively uploading files to a spaceship!”

We’re living in the future, y’all!

Memories Much Older and Richer Than Our Own

Sad news – The Chickasaw Journal in Houston, Mississippi has published its final edition after well over a century.

As my second job out of college, many many moons ago, I was the managing editor of this newspaper, back when it was known as The Houston Times-Post. I’m not entirely sure how far back the paper’s history went; The Times-Post was formed by the consolidation of the Times and Post in 1913. The Tupelo-based company that owned the Daily Journal in that city acquired it a few years later and changed the historic name to match its own.

There’s a lot I could say about this, a lot of raging I could do against the dying of the light, but time is precious and life is short. Instead, I’ll say only this – among the many things I hope to inculcate in my son, high among them is the virtue of stewardship.

In my journalism career, I had the privilege of being a caretaker of institutions many times older than myself, and felt strongly I had a responsibility to honor their legacy and to do my best to ensure that when I moved on, I left them behind as strong as I’d received them. An individual or company might legally own a newspaper, but their old names belonged to the community they served.

Later, as president of the Historical Society here, I served the same principle – my duty was to preserve and pass on both the institution and the stories it safeguards, so that future generations will inherit all that past generations left me.

Too often today, we act as if things are there for us for which we should instead be caretakers, and allow to fade from this Earth memories much older and richer than our own.