Reach Out And Touch Someone

Annmarie Throckmorton, M.A.
5 days ago
2 min read

There was a time when everyone knew what it meant to say the tag line of a telecommunications commercial, "Reach Out And Touch Someone." Online AI tells me ”"Reach Out and Touch Someone was AT&T’s iconic campaign encouraging long-distance calls to foster personal connections." But the telephone's slogan soon degraded to mean to contact someone in a negative or at least in an unwelcomed way. That phrase generated lots of jokes until it was one dumb joke too many and people stopped saying it.

Now in the first quarter of the twenty-first century we have innumerable ways of reaching out and touching someone, and most of them are still vaguely unwelcome, startling, or even rejectionable. (Thank goodness for the "block" feature.)

Humanity's various technological modes of communication now go far beyond in-person facial expressions, body language, and physical touch as in knock on their door, say hello, and hug them so tight you can smell their breath. We have: ye olde phone which is now rebranded as a mobile aka a device one must needs carry in the palm of one's hand or risk missing an important contact ringing in or leaving a voice mail. If phoning is too up close and personal, and for some it increasingly feels that way, we have Zoom meetings and other video communications. Even more remotely we have email which is now so heavily linked to work or doing home accounts that no matter how many pretty trite JPGs or cute jittery GIFs one attaches to emails they remain repulsive.

Since about 2000, we have had texting, SMS, MMS, RCS chat, and just plain chatting, the differences between which may be important but not to me. At texting's most intimate level we have real-time sexting which is a curious beast. Sexting is intimately performed with one's mobile a few inches from one's brain as one types straight onto lines that a corresponding brain is likely comprehend within a second or so, faster than talking, less inhibited, and possibly illustrated with a salacious pic or two. Sexting is brain-to-brain action whether you like it or not. My only experience with it was yucky, sexy, and revelatory, so to each his/her own.

Most of the above technologies are available on all of our devices, on mobiles, personal computers, and tablets — take your pick. Old schoolers still have clunky fax machines, and somewhere we have a redundancy of telegraphs for Morse code by hand, maybe even pagers clipped on belts for a seriously retro look. Not to mention flashing lights and tippy-top secret aerospace and defense telecommunication nodes with space lasers and whatnot. I know people around the world who are still drumming at each other, and as a previous member of several drumming circles I can affirm that that ancient mode of communication, creating intensely personal vibrations in the air for all to hear and respond to, is still one of the best ways of communicating. Is a drum technology? Sure, look it up.

So what is the countup of technological ways to communicate today? Twenty-ish.

Tippy-Top Telecommunications Nodes