March 12, 2025–Local feed dealer Bruce Woerner once told me about the time he was drinking coffee with his buddies at the local diner. One member of the group always kept his nose in the newspaper, so Bruce decided to have a little fun. He took out his lighter, leaned over, and set the paper on fire.
This still makes me laugh, but I was thinking how it is also a comment on our current pearl-clutching about how much time we spend on social media.
Perhaps it is a tale of every generation lamenting the lost focus of following ones, as we were judged for buying comic books by our dads, who were judged for reading dime novels by their dads, who were judged for watching pre-code movies by their moms.
I bring a different perspective. Raise your hand if you inhaled bowls of breakfast food while reading the backs of the cereal boxes? Heck, many of those big companies printed stories, riddles, and jokes on the boxes just for that reason. They knew kids would pour an extra bowl of sugar-infused Snappies just to find the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx.
Our parents didn’t care, or even notice, because they were listening to the morning AM radio host describe haymaking weather and intone cattle futures.
Back home of an evening, I can’t recall a night when our one television set wasn’t on, starting at 6:00 pm for the news and weather, through the prime-time lineup of Andy, Dick, Ed, Lawrence, and Marlin–depending on the night–then more news and weather at 10, followed by Johnny until the test pattern winked on. No cell phones or computers or wifi, but the big old Trinitron dominated the living room like a quotidian cyclops. We hadn’t met Siri or Alexa, but we knew Sony.
The print media was my addiction. Through high school, college, and early career, I poured through dailies, Sundays, special editions, newsletters, weekly magazines like Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, slicks like LIFE and National Geographic, and guilty pleasures like Reader’s Digest.
I read them all. I couldn’t start the day without the morning news. My family learned to bring home the fat Sunday edition if they were out and about. I couldn’t take a cross-country car trip without buying a newspaper in each town where we gassed up.
And those were the days when each medium-sized city had both morning and evening editions. We read them both.
It was not only for the daily news. The newspaper brought us crosswords, puzzles, letters to the editor, gossip about celebrities I didn’t know, stories of sports I didn’t watch, recipes I’d never cook, and other delicious diversions. Hmm. Doesn’t that sound similar to what we poke our noses into online today?
Maybe the point is that most of us always looked for distractions, or more positively, a window on the world outside of our four walls and a walkup. Maybe that is all that our current obsession with smart phones and internet is about. Maybe we’re not succumbing to our robotic overlords. Maybe we are just continuing our propensity for interacting with the larger world that started with showing off our mastodon paintings to the hunter-gatherer in the cave next door.
Maybe nothing’s changed… except that you can’t set a cell phone on fire with a lighter.
XXX
Phil Houseal pokes his nose in at FullHousePR.com