A call came out of the blue the other week. It seems I had signed a contract in 1994 with a company that gave it certain "electronic" rights. It was creating a problem in today's world because the meaning of what these rights entailed had changed. My feeling is that most people in 1994 would have had a hard time envisioning just what electronic rights would mean in 2009. Things have change that much. The question becomes, when the technology changes, does the meaning of the word changes. Also, does somebody have an obligation to accept the new meaning, one that couldn't have been predicted, when he signed a contract under a different set of circumstances?
This line of thinking has more to do than with legal contracts. Our relationships have changed immensely over the past decade. We are more in touch with people, many of them strangers, than ever before without touching them. Text messaging, Facebook and Twitter have brought new dimensions to the way we interact with each other.
Just like my legal contract, how do we maintain our relationships in a world where the very meaning of that word often changes faster than we can keep up with it?
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