Nothing important to communicate

 "Echo 1, NASA’s first communications satellite, was launched on this date in 1960." WA 

What a different world we live in now, constantly chattering and listening to chatter that's been beamed into space and back. But Thoreau's point about the telegraph still applies, doesn't it?

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

 Much of what leaks into our broad, flapping ears lately seems to be gossipy infotainment (including most political discourse and other "reality" programming). I don't want to ditch the satellites - Commander Kelly's satellite transmissions have been transcendent - but down here on the ground there's definitely room for real "improvements."

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