Wish something would break in some kind of easement to peace, you know? We woke to expect more announcements of conflict this morning. You know what we are talking about. The unsettled nature of who is at war with whom with still hot, and we could sure use an epiphany. We will see how this plays out. The President flew across the Atlantic this week, out of our beginning to the day and into the one well in progress in the Eastern Mediterranean. There are a bunch of people between here and now and what is coming at us.

We are living in one of those periodic cycles that afflict human society. We are grateful on The Patio- our technologies have outstripped the institutions on which they were based. Communication is one of them. Mr. Elon Musk has demonstrated the capacity to replace some old things with new ones. He bought that social media platform we are supposed to claim is named “X,” formerly known as something else.

Today, an adventure in X-land is one in which a single ‘tweet’ can circulate news or information that is- breaking, mis or mal- addressed to millions of people in a matter of seconds. But that has been going on for more than four decades. We recall when it started and have been living in a world with a nonstop, endless barrage of news since CNN kickstarted the 24-hour news cycle in 1980.

Before that technological revolution, the one we are in at the moment, there was an older one that now seems downright quaint. Remember paper-boys? There was a whole network of delivery kids who could get the breaking news to you in the morning and afternoon papers. If there was something really hot, it came with shouting and noise that went like: “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”

It is sort of strange to carry the bulk of human knowledge in a thin black rectangular device in a back or side pocket. So strange we don’t even notice it. Maybe Marshal McLuhan had this all worked out with his media messaging back in the 1970s. We took a quick poll and agree that as a group we missed the magnitude of the change. But why would those kids be shouting that phrase in particular? Extra what? And where did whatever it is come from?

The first issue of America’s oldest paper was published on Nov. 16, 1801. If you care about current culture and Broadway Shows, that is nearly three years before Hamilton would die in the infamous duel with Aaron Burr. The evolution of the paper was simple and linear. Starting out, the Evening Post was merely a single sheet of paper folded in half to create four pages on which to print “News!”.

The city of New York is a place where Newsies- paperboys in their day- adopted the phrase “Read!” and for emphasis, if the Day merited mention in print, it might end with the phrase: “Extra! Extra!”

The Publishers claim that phrase was shouted to try to sell the “extras.” In street parlance, this amounted to any edition of a paper not issued in accordance with the regular publication schedule. We know it as the news cycle, of course, but can you recall having to wait for news to be printed on paper and delivered to you?

One of the stalwarts of New York City publishing world is the New York Post. If an extraordinary event happened after the morning press run, another “second edition” would be printed to bring “breaking news” to readers. The Newsies would advertise the new editions as an “Extra! Extra!” For those who might not understand that there could be “New News! In the Afternoon,” the Newsies could then recommend that purchasers “read all about it!”

Something like what we are experiencing now has occurred before. The most dramatic might be when Radio was sweeping the land in the 1930s in a fashion no two-per-day newspaper could match. Joseph Pulitzer was one of those who had an idea of how information was going to be packaged and marketed, since newspapers simply couldn’t compete with broadcasting’s speed and flexibility.

We are in a period of change more profound than that. Between Artificial Intelligence (AI!) and new devices that make their applications work, we are leaving the world in which we were raised far behind. There are routine portrayals of humans so fixated on their pocket phones that they run face=first into light-poles and parking meters. Now that we are physically connected to the digital universe, we ought to be able to look up and see whether there is anything extra about it, you know?

It might even be an extra extra! We could read all about it!

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com