I am older than most and younger than some, which is to say I came of age long before the Internet became a thing. In those ancient days, as I noted in a Daily Prompt post from last September, I fell out of bed every morning, dragged a comb across my head, found my way downstairs to the dining-room table, and read the sports and entertainment sections of the Philadelphia Inquirer while chowing down on whatever on-sale cereal my mom picked up the weekend before. Then, some 20 or 30 minutes later, I was out the door and on my way to the school bus stop located a half mile away.
Other kids—friends, acquaintances, annoyances—undertook the same trek at the same time. We walked together through heat and cold, rain and snow, trading smalltalk about this ’n’ that (but mostly what we watched on TV the night before), plus occasional insults, until the bus deposited us at the high school’s holding pen, aka the cafeteria. That was our social media platform, in a sense, with news and rumors spreading from table to table through the cliques and claques of kids—from freaks to geeks to jocks to jerks. Teachers patrolled to ensure everyone behaved.
My initial introduction to the nascent Internet, I suppose, came via a movie in 1983, just a few months after I graduated high school: WarGames. In it, a geeky kid shows off his hacker skills to a computer-illiterate girl, making use of a telephone modem, before finding himself facing off against an AI-imbued computer threatening to turn a war simulation into a nuclear holocaust. (For those curious: the film’s first act offers a solid portrayal of what life was like for suburban teens in the early ‘80s.)
Within a decade, as I noted in this Daily Prompt post in January, Diane and I were prowling the sandboxed universe of Prodigy, an online service co-owned by (believe it or not) Sears, via a secondhand computer my father picked out for us. What’s funny, looking back, is how innocent it all was—or, perhaps, how naive we were.
What I most miss about the pre-Internet days: the pace. In the instant-on world in which we now live, life unreels at a breakneck speed—a news story that arises in the a.m. is expected to be resolved by that night and, if not, answers are demanded. Outrage is plentiful. Cynicism and suspicion, too. It’s more than the tinpot despot, who’s a symptom and not the cause; it’s a cultural thing born from ever-increasing short attention spans.
Even music is different. New releases arrived in stores in Tuesdays, but often took weeks or months to break. It was customary, too, to read reviews of those albums months later in the music magazines I consumed—Rolling Stone, Record, Creem, Trouser Press, assorted others—at the local bookstore or newsstand. That’s no longer the case.
Mind you, life in the 1970s and ’80s wasn’t all peaches and cream. As I noted in a post from 2013, “As awful as the economy has been since 2008, the inflation and unemployment rates throughout the 1970s and early ‘80s bear witness to the fact that being an adult with adult responsibilities was tough back then.” Being a kid could be difficult, too, but those problems weren’t compounded by the online world.
The Old Grey Cat 