Word: calling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Most likely to fail in the middle of a billion-dollar deal. It was the technological breakthrough that made where people make their calls ("I'm calling from the freeway! The chairlift! The beach!") as important as what they had to say. The concept behind the cellular telephone is to divide a geographical region into overlapping "cells," each assigned its own radio frequency. As callers travel from one telephone cell to another, a complex computer system automatically switches their call from one frequency to the next. And with a little luck, the party they're talking to gets switched...
Most likely to leave you talking to yourself. Making a quick phone call to ask a simple question? Forget it. Since the advent of voice mail (a.k.a. automated answering systems), there are no simple questions -- just a maze of electronic choices that could have been designed by Kafka. Got a medical emergency? Please push 1. Want something kinky? Press 4. Need to talk to a human? Just stay on the line...
Perhaps just as important, the Gorbachev phenomenon may have a transforming effect outside the communist world, on the perceptions and therefore the policies of the West. Watching him ought to inspire, in addition to awe, suspense and admiration, an epiphany about what his fellow citizens call, with increasing irony, anger and impatience, "Soviet reality." Gorbachev's determination to restructure that reality should induce Westerners to practice a kind of reverse engineering on the images in their own mind. The question of the hour should be not just, What next? but, Knowing what we know now, having seen what we have...
Bush still has what ballplayers call "rabbit ears," which pick up even the smallest criticism. Administration officials acknowledge that all his initiatives (other than China) were in part responses to carping, real or potential. Early on, the President was assailed for being too cautious in dealing with arms control and Gorbachev. Had he let a coup topple Aquino, he would have been denounced for losing a democratically elected ally in the Philippines...