‘Oh, How Things Are Changing…Fast’

I’m Think I’m Starting To Sound Like A Great Grandparent…

Chatting with Braden the other day, we were discussing the importance of manually tracking shifts, reviewing pay stubs for errors and ensuring overtime hours are accurate.

“Oh, it will be fine Mom”, he said.

It dawned on me that I hadn’t bothered to ask him how they clock in and out each night and just assumed it was written on a timesheet or something.

Finger prints — that’s their time card system.

I had no idea that was a thing…in Kamloops at a grocery store anyway…and as a parent of a working-aged son, I didn’t bother to enquire about that technologically ‘more secure’, ‘more streamlined’ way either.

Oh, how things are changing…fast.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -

I had to choose one last second-year elective class to fulfill the requirements for that particular semester of university credits so I opted to enrol in a communications and media class.

It was there I first learned of the late Marshall McLuhan.

An Edmonton-born Canadian philosopher who studied and taught media theory, people (and Wikipedia) credit McLuhan with predicting the World Wide Web…

“McLuhan coined the expression “the medium is the message” and the term global village, and predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspective.”-Wikipedia.

I’ll refer back (as I almost always do) to the O.G. for this one and say that the Bible predicted instantaneous global communication capacities first.

“And for three and a half days, all peoples, tribes, languages, and nations will stare…” Revelation 11:9 (NLT).

While this short phrase on its own isn’t extraordinary, context makes it so.

Context: ‘The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.’-Oxford Dictionary.

Back in the day when the above scripture was originally written, people moved by camel, donkey or horseback and information was delivered by way of flying fowl — so needless to say distant communication took a while and there certainly wasn’t a digital anything on (most) people’s minds.

In Revelation 11:9, the words or concept of “all peoples…and nations”, having a medium to partake in something simultaneously was unfathomable to the majority of (then) human beings.

And “stare[ing]” together in unison can be explained as the World Wide Web with the capacity to live video streaming, FaceTime and the like.

Some things to consider.

Now, was McLuhan’s ‘prediction’ brought about by some superhuman, faculty? or was the information there all along, available to everyone yet he had the academic credentials to make it sound better?

There are other interesting observations that have struck a chord with me lately…many are hiding in plain sight.

Oh, how things are changing…fast.

John 13:19.

-Becky