Traditions Now Measured In Minutes Instead of Centuries: Change Due to the Internet and Social media

Traditions-FNT-Small.pngLLANIDLOES, WALES – Died-in-the-wool traditionalists are bemoaning the gradual loss of community-minded events like May Day, and the Internet and social media are being blamed.

“I am completely disgusted. There isn’t a Maypole to be found within five-hundred miles these days,” said Eddie Stempowski, thirty-one, from London. “The next thing we know, traditions like Christmas and St. Valentine’s day will disappear too. You just watch.”

“And what about Maslenitsa? “ he continued, “It used to happen at the end of February and lasted a week. We celebrated the end of winter. My family cooked pancakes over fires and burnt straw scarecrows of winter. But last February when I lit a fire, a hook and ladder truck showed up. I blame those busybodies on social media.”

Mr. Stempowski is not alone in noting this alarming trend in disappearing traditions and his observations are backed up by solid research.

An Oxford University study has shown that traditions previously begun, carried on and passed down for hundreds of years are now being started, practiced and then discarded within minutes.

This flouting of habitual group behavior that, once established with symbolic meaning, used to persist and be passed on to later generations, does not bode well for the future.

“My friends and I had a tradition between eleven o’clock and noon of sending hashtagged photos to each other” said Tara Loudsen, who is studying first-year milk carton decorating at university. “But that was so this morning.”

“I tried to start a tradition in my family,” grumbled twenty-three year old Shawn Overmyer, looking down at his smartphone while he texted as he talked, not making eye contact, “And I set the boundaries for it and everything, but I couldn’t get anyone else interested in posting disappearing media to the Internet.”   Source: FNT Staff

Photo credit: Original images at: Sykes Cottages, CNBC

Retro Trends: “New and Improved” Telegram Service Launched as a Smartphone App

Getty Images-Couple-FNT-Small.pngTORONTO – Within days of Belgium closing down its ancient telegram service, (one of the last still operating in the world, with only a handful of customers) a local software developer, Morton Underbraught, has designed and launched an application that replicates the original telegraph model of sending a long-distance message.  His startup company, headquartered in an Etobicoke business park, is setting up a firm to provide old fashioned telegram service to smartphone users worldwide.

“It’s an exciting time,” he said. “Most people today have even never heard the word telegram. “My app is designed to bring the electrical telegraph into the 21st-Century.”

Underbraught seemed surprised to learn that the UK, the U.S.A. and India had all closed down their telegraph systems years ago, citing a dwindling customer market in the age of the Internet and text messaging.

“Wow, that’s news to me,” he said. “I guess I didn’t get that telegram.”

The young software designer was also quick to discount the idea that his app might be just another socially-driven trend with a short shelf life. “Hey, people really value things from bygone days,” he said. “Why else would the scientists be working on reviving extinct species?”

The budding entrepreneur did admit to having to work a few more bugs out of his creation before it gained widespread commercial acceptance. “Of course every smartphone user will have to learn Morse code,” he said.

He also explained that he was having trouble hiring trained telephone operators and was in a hassle with the provincial labour people over the minimum age for telegram boys with bicycles.

Underbraught also shrugged off a negative report from a business analyst that speculated on the commercial viability of adapting and applying a one-hundred and seventy year old technology to today’s modern world.

“Hey, vinyl didn’t die,” he said. “Neither did bell bottoms or Polaroid cameras. Retro is here to stay.” Source: FNT Staff

Photo credit: Original images at: Essential Tennis, BBC News/Getty Images , The Economic Times