Technology and the U.S. Census

For Traditionalists, the Census is Great!

Phone booths, three television channels, playing pickup baseball games in an empty lot, and MTV playing music videos. These are things that seemed trivial 25 years ago, but for some reason I now long for them.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be writing this, and you wouldn't be reading this without the advent of the technological break throughs of the past two decades. Technology has both, been great, and unfortunate.

For some reason, a simple telephone booth on the corner of Main Street jogs memories as a child in the 1980's. As a seven-year old, a small group of us would get bored after playing eight hours of basketball in the driveway, so we would meander the town for some new adventures.

Many times, we would head up the street three blocks, buy some Mountain Dew and candy bars, and head to the park. The park was minimal, with a community center, an awning outside with some picnic tables, and some (looking back now) dangerous playground equipment. Along the highway at the edge of the park was a telephone booth, with the mangled and weathered phone book.

We would devour the junk food, and head over to that old pay phone. Sometimes, we would pick out our friends to prank call, while others we would just randomly pick out numbers from the phone book. These prank calls were never harming or threatening, mostly just laughing because we couldn't compose ourselves. Other times, we would use the tired old, "Is your refridgerator running?"

After playing outside for hours upon hours, we would retire to flip on MTV, and catch the latest videos, both crappy and cool. Of course, that was at my friends' house that had CABLE TELEVISION......with an infinite amount of channels (like 30).

I recall at times throughout my youth, how cool it would be to not have to walk all the way across town to a friend's house, if I could just make a phone call anywhere, or if there was a TV station that was strictly all baseball, or all football. Little did I know, that would be the world we lived in, in the not-so-distant future.

So with all of the technological breakthroughs, heck, in the last five to ten years, the U.S. Census is still done the way it was a century ago. A form mailed to each household, to be filled out and mailed back.

We have the freaking Internet on our PHONES now!!! We have GPS units in our CARS!!!! And this is the best method....in 2010....to track the population of the United States?!?!?! I'm a traditionalist and all, but it just seems like a costly and ineffective way to conduct such a reading in this day and age.