Technology's Unkept Promise (one of them)

There was a simpler time. A time when you could say as much as you had to say to the person you have to say things to. Well, at least until the dinosaur ate you.

But as hunting/gathering became all the rage, more time was spent apart. No longer was she by your side as you felled and butchered the mastodon. She was back searching for rutebagas and tending to the young'uns.

Enter the alphabet. You can leave a note for your love on the wall of your cave. You go out to slay the migratory beasts, and when she wakes up she gets to read your your note of love, written in the blood of a sabertooth tiger. As long as you can fit your declaration of love in the first twenty feet of your stone abode where the light can reach.

A long time passed. And then, paper. You could leave reams of correspondence to your beloved. Except for that damn candle that would burn out before you had written out all you meant to tell her.

Ah, oil lamps. Refillable (as long as there are sperm whales). But now the rage is the telegraph. Send your message by post and it will not arrive until your debutante is a fiancee. But those telegraphs are so expensive--

Now the Telephone! Then the Singing telegram! Marvel before the Dancing bear-a-gram! Every mode of communication that has supplanted another has this same limitation: you can't write as long as you find yourself wanting to. Just when long-distance telephone companies priced themselves into oblivion, it was all the rage to have the mobility of a cell phone. Which one of us has not found themselves revealing the deepest darkest secrets of their soul to a "battery empty" message flashing on the screen? At least wired phones have the decency to respond to your most tightly-held thoughts ("I killed a man" or "I bought a Spice Girls album", the stuff you could only admit to a lover with a heart not fitted to later blackmail) with the reaffirming constancy of a dial tone.

Why can't inventors focus on turning an old technology reliable, instead of making new ones that make our art and our expressions end before--