https://www.axios.com/2024/01/05/pre-internet-pay-phones-digital-online-cellphones-vintage-nostalgia
From the Atlantic article they link:
I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones. A barren expanse of empty time would stretch out before you: waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start. Someone might be late or take longer than expected, but no notice of such delay would arrive, so you’d stare out the window, hoping to see some sign of activity down the block. You’d pace, or sulk, or stew.
Dude, read a book. What the fuck?
I don't have a smartphone and am happy to answer any other questions.
seriously, I would bring a book wherever I went. these people are intellectual voids
Earlier in the Axios thing they talk about people watching Friends and Seinfeld to understand the before times. But they're forgetting Elaine aghast at Puddy for not reading on a plane. "You're just gonna sit there, staring at the back of the seat?" "Yeah."
You'd be surprised how little most people actually read books.
Books, sketchpads, knitting or some other portable craft, table games like flick football and pocket chess, crystal radios. Plenty to do to pass time. There’s nothing on my phone that’s new.
Boomers, Gen Xers and elder millennials are now the last people who remember what it was like to use a pay phone, a paper map, a typewriter, etc. — and they're being rapidly outnumbered by younger adults who don't.
younger millennials and even elder zoomers remember those things, at least the pay phones if nothing else
I'm a YM and I've used all of those things
Typewriters? I'm an elder zoomer and we had computer class and big personal computers to type on when I was a young kid.
yeah we never used typewriters in school either. I just used one bc my parents had it
the other stuff though was standard
I’m an older millennial and I’ve be never used a typewriter. Think I’ve only seen them in museums
An IBM Selectric is the last one I ever used. Meanwhile, I’ve had internet since ‘88 and a family computer in the home since ‘85. I’m described as elder Millinial, but I prefer Digitally Native Gen X frankly.
Damn you had internet in ‘88? We didn’t get it until around ‘94.. around 6th or 7th grade for me. Been hooked since!
I think I may be the same age as you. I’m ‘82 but my 2000 graduating class was ‘81-‘82 kids.
I’m actually just a bit younger than you. We had it because my dad worked at Bell Labs and Scientific Atlanta way back when, so we could get the hook ups and build out whatever computing or network machinery we needed at the time. It was like sci-fi legos learning it as I grew up. It was great!
My dad worked at Bell South in Atlanta lol. My perk was having a cell phone since ‘97
StarTAC! Then I had a Nokia 5100 when I went to college with a blue airbrushed lighting faceplate so it looked like the cover of Ride the Lightning. I might have made three total calls between the two of them and never texted, only partly because it was 10 cents a text.
My friends all had pagers so my phone was the lifeline so they didn’t have to use a pay phone if we were out. I don’t think I ever texted until the iPhone came out.
Ride the lightning album cover is one of the best covers of all time! Also liked and justice for all cover too and master of puppets wasn’t bad either. They must have run out of ideas by the time the black album was released lol
My Grandma had a Word Processor (hardware, not software) for years after she got a PC. She just liked using it and mailing personal letters to family.
Do you have some kind of portable device that allows others to instantaneously reach you?
I don’t like how the author said this, I but kinda agree with what they are getting at. Any time I’m in a line or waiting for something, I just pull out my phone and amuse myself. Before smart phones, in those situations I was usually just alone with my thoughts. I’m now at the point that being alone with my thoughts can make me a bit fidgety and uncomfortable.
As if the same people who get angry at you for looking at your phone wouldn’t also beat the shit out of you if you pulled out a book. As if you could just pull out a book in line. Do you carry a backpack literally everywhere? Most people don’t, hence what the author said.
Also, reading a book takes quite a bit more commitment, and you’re a little less connected to the environment when you do it.
There are a lot of books that are pocket-sized, and many people carry purses. I don't have a book every time I'm in line at the grocery store, but for the examples the author uses - "waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start" - yes, of course I'll have a book with me.
No one's beaten the shit out of me for it yet. (Some folk did look askance at me at a wedding once.) But we're not even talking about "people who get angry at you for looking at your phone," we're talking about people who pretend they have no idea how humans ever functioned without phones.
I think they still watch a similar amount. They just also have their phones out now
Yeah I guess that's another big difference: people used to mostly only be able to consume one dumb thing at a time.
I think the difference is maybe more pronounced with young people. I remember being like 12 and just... sitting there and watching whole episodes of TV shows, back to back, with commercials and everything. I can't imagine most adults today doing that, let alone kids. You were just sort of captive to whatever happened to be available right then and there. It was usually something you'd seen before, but what else are you going to do? You could read books, but you were also limited to whatever you physically had picked up from the bookstore or library.
I would read the same magazines 2-4 times thru. And I'd read mom's magazines too. Did I care about a better home or garden? No, but it was better than nothing when my mom had control of the remote and settled on some old musical in black and white
Yep. My parents also had this huge first aid/medical diagnosis tome thing that I spent so much time with as a kid. It had a bunch of pictures of various injuries and illness symptom tables, along with what to go about them. It was actually really fucking rad, and I'm only just now remembering it. You really did have to look hard at your environment to find something to do, but sometimes there were gems.
Yes! The Harvard Family Health Guide or the American College of Physicians Home Medical Guide! And my dad always bought every new edition of the Green Beret Medical Handbook!
The typical Fox News addict of today also probably wouldn’t have been caught dead watching anything news related outside of local evening and maybe 20/20 depending on the subject matter. The CNN nerds were still watching though.
There was also a better spread of educational programming in popular circulation (talking NASA-owned TLC days and prior here).
that, and they watch stuff on youtube/tiktok instead
there's a pop-sociology book written in the 80s, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, that convincingly argues against the dominance of mass media. It has some major flaws, which I will allow you to discover for yourself, but its conclusions are very compelling and I think it provides some useful tools for evaluating the deluge of "informative" content.
Maybe out of favor now as the media landscape has changed, but it used to be standard reading in high school media literacy/criticisn section for English class.
I remember reading it when I was in high school (early 2000s) and not liking it, but I was dumb and I'd consider reading it again.
i promise you will find new, better reasons to not like it
So some boomer argued things weren’t boring enough? Have they ever had a job?
If people actually had the standards for being entertained they should we would have global communism already. Spending 8+ hours straight where you aren’t allowed to do anything you want to and are expected to subvert all of your brain’s resources to your cash overlord is the most boring experience known to man.
“Ohhhh I’m bored now at work, the world is ending, the woke agenda has transferred the boredom mind virus” welcome to being under stimulated fucker, wonder how people with ADHD feel when you tell them they’re penalized for fidgeting or looking at their phone?
Certainly there’s a factor of problematicness with how social media is constantly designed to be as addictive as possible, but for some reason these fuckers always focus on how kids these days are listening to music (a REAL, ACTUAL communist writer unironically claimed this was caused by hedonic treadmilling and not enough organizing, and not just having fucking ADHD) or reading Wikipedia instead of working or while being at class. Maybe blame the boring ass work conditions instead of the technology that’s finally made you realize you deserve more from your time?
“Why don’t I enjoy looking at a spreadsheet for 70% of my life? My phone has infected me!”
Being bored at work is different than being bored at leisure. I don't know why, but it just is.
Is that the one that got posted all over the "normie" internet back in 2011-2012? That makes a half-brained argument against TV and saying that 1984 was too obvious and that people would rebel, and that the real dystopia was Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451? Because I remember reading that title on 9gag back then and wondering if my english skills were failing me, since I could not make sense of that at all.
Cell phones didn't become commonplace until I was in my teens. Before that, we were free! If someone didn't show up when they were supposed to and they didn't answer their home phone we just assumed they were dead and then moved on with our lives. If your car broke down, you sat on the side of the road with your sunshade inside-out and it had a message that asked people to call for help. Presidential Shootings were much more common place. Shoplifting was way easier because there were so few cameras. MTV played music videos!
Shoplifting is actually easier now cause most stores don't want the liability that comes with physically apprehending shoplifters. Most of them still have "Loss Prevention" but they don't have cuffs anymore and aren't supposed to touch you. And local PD usually doesn't care enough to investigate someone who they don't have in custody when they call.
Lol, I think it may depend on where you live. Most loss prevention departments that i'm aware of spend their time building a case so that the cops can pick you up when you're ready to leave the store. And that's if you're lucky enough to not get shot by some chud that thinks they're sheriff of their store.
Before smart phones I carried a book everywhere I went and would pull it out at any point I'd generally reach for my phone now. I also got lost driving a lot.
I'd always have a portable CD player or radio and would get to be the navigator during family roadtrips and read from the map book
Hearing people as old as my boomer parents be confused by the amount of physical maps in my car currently is always jarring.
I've got a big ol atlas because I read somewhere that over-relying on google maps messes up your ability to function without it. It was super inconvenient at first but now I know offhand the direction and distance to just about every city in my county - and this after an entire lifetime of thinking that I had a terrible sense of direction, the truth was I had just never developed it.
I'm like this but because I use google earth for fun
I've got a big ol atlas because I read somewhere that over-relying on google maps messes up your ability to function without it.
I think there's no way that's actually true. Google maps helps me arrive somewhere for the first time, but after a small number of times I can drive most places without looking at it. I'll still use it, because "go another route because there is a huge traffic jam following an unannounced pothole filling or car accident" isn't a possible skill to learn. Also Google maps is fucking glitchy, you still need to read signs and know where you are anyways, otherwise you're missing turns 25% of the time.
I would have a CD player, book, and GBA/DS on me at all times in high school. Never had an issue with boredom until I got a smartphone. Now it's constantly fighting for my attention and preventing me from do things I want to do
I've met many zoomers who just stopped using a smartphone for several months or years. Myself being one. It's not that hard. Boomers need to put their ipad down for once.
If you're not addicted to ordering food delivery and social media there's really no need for one outside of maybe job requirements.
the ability to search for any information humanity has acquired at a moment’s notice
I had an e-ink tablet I put all of Wikipedia and wiktionary in 3 languages on. It was like ~64G. No internet or smartphone needed. I distinctly remember carrying around pocket dictionaries as a kid too.
Can’t look up recipes or manuals on Wikipedia
Dictionaries can’t give you instructions on how to maintenance a device you lost the manual for
You can’t find the optimal choices for product buying at a moment’s notice with an encyclopedia (and don’t tell me the internet is too useless for that now, yeah, it’s harder, but it’s still possible)
I generally agree with you but WikiBooks (adjacent project to Wikipedia) actually has a pretty great cookbook these days. Also a lot of other cool books
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents
Those are all things you generally do at home and therefore would look up with a computer. On my computer I've been hoarding textbooks, datasheets and manuals for quite some time. I've been hoarding scientific databases like protein db too but it's a pain. Everything on the internet is ephemeral. If you value this information you shouldn't rely on someone else to host it for you.
optimal choices for product buying at a moment’s notice with an encyclopedia
If I'm out and about then I don't need to find the "optimal product". Either it's a big purchase I already researched or it's a small purchase where the primary consideration is quantity of product divided by cost.
In fact when datahoarding I find that reference books published before the internet are generally more convenient because it's all self contained and meant to be navigated without search. For example a book with tables of stress-strain curves is more convenient to store because it's just a pdf you can easily search through manually, versus a modern database you probably have to scrape off some website, usually in some annoying format you need specialized software to deal with and have to spend an afternoon installing packages and writing scripts just to look at it. And when an update breaks the delicate python environment you need to run some janky library for this specific format which could've just been a CSV you're fucked.
If I'm out and about then I don't need to find the "optimal product". Either it's a big purchase I already researched or it's a small purchase where the primary consideration is quantity of product divided by cost.
Hahahahah, look at Mr Executive Function over here remembering to look things up before leaving the house.
I would never.
Went to a store once that didn't have prices just item ids which I had to enter on their website to get the information.
things were more boring
way to tell on yourself you fucking dud!
Video games came with manuals that had sections for notes and people actually put notes in there, this was before youtube walkthroughs.
renting final fantasy 2 at blockbuster that had an end game save on it
There were those printed guides for the bigger games. I remember walking down to the mall and checking the guide when I got stuck in Tomb Raider 2. Gamefaqs has been around since 1995, I wasn't online til, I think 98 or 99.
In full color! With glossy pages! Get one of those and a November EGM and you’re set
Your library of self-made notebooks were the pelts on the wall of your past game conquests.
A lot of stuff has been said so I won't repeat them, here's a weird one though - I don't know what americans experienced so this might be weird to those people but here on terf island a phenomenon that's not often discussed it that back in the day if you wanted to look at porn you could go for a walk in your local patch of woods. Pre-internet there were piles of porn mags in every patch of woods in the country.
EDIT: Aww fuck "forest porn" is lower in the comments.
Generations of kids hiding them from their parents or something more sinister?
Yeah kids I assume that stole them from the local top shelf or found a stash at home to steal.
Either way this is a serious thing that existed that everyone remembers when you remind them.
I’m just imagining a sleazy porn producer doing his rounds. dropping off the weekly stack of playboys in each glade and copse to addict the local lads while they’re young.
I remember all of this. You read books or a newspaper or listened to music in a queue. Maybe you played a gameboy
Libraries were more commonly used, as were encyclopaedias and later progams like encarta
We had calendars and diaries for meetings.
Most ofnthe same things were there it just wasn't in a tiny box and it was a bit more awkward.
One thing that I think is really interesting to consider is how the information landscape has changed and what implications that has.
Before the internet and the prevalence of the "modern" internet, if you wanted to learn about something (especially if it was very new), then you almost certainly had to be exposed to PR to learn about it. This is especially true if you weren't an academic, so the majority of people.
I think this allowed marketing and PR to have a really captive audience especially because the lag in information was much longer. A news article could run in print media in under 24 hours with a narrative and the message would disseminate amongst people and the next turnaround time for something rebutting or debunking this narrative would be at least another 24 hours, assuming a different journalist was capable of producing an opinion piece with a really quick turnaround time or someone like a commentator or expert might be able to do the same in a letter to the editor (where they would get a tiny column that a lot of newspaper readers wouldn't even bother to read). But in realistic terms it might take a week or a month or longer for a countervailing narrative to emerge if people needed to hear about the article, track it down, do some independent research, and produce something that they might have to shop around in order to get it published somewhere. And then that countervailing narrative often has a lag time where it needs to circulate amongst people, often fairly gradually.
It was much easier for people to get hyped up on bullshit products or services and to be spun a lie or a carefully curated half-truth that could take root long before something more evenhanded and reflective of reality could begin to supplant it. If that latter part ever happened at all.
Now the way that marketing and PR has to function, as well as the thing I'm going to refer to as "narrative curation" (think stuff like Wikipedia or review sites which aren't actually PR but which aggregate info and which tend to preference certain information while deemphasizing other info in a conscious way), is largely very different because the speed at which information travels, the hugely expanded access/ready-accesss to information (yes, technically anybody could go to their local library immediately after receiving info to fact-check and develop a deeper understanding [as long as it was open] but in effect nobody was really doing that and so ease of access is at least as important to consider as a theoretical level of access), and the way that sources of information have been... I don't want to say decentralised because that's not accurate, but more like proliferated or something.
It's also interesting that another major difference is that this older model of information access meant that we structured ourselves to this access, in the sense that people would need to schedule their time around getting the news broadcast or they would have to listen to the radio program at the time that the radio program was playing.
Now I think that we have a situation where our schedule is not structured to our access to information anymore but, because our info access is on-demand, we are structured by our information access in the sense that the boundaries of time and place on information are mostly dissolved and so we become the demographics that are distinguished by how we primarily access our info - think the person who gets their news and politics from streamers on twitch vs the person who gets their opinions shaped by R*ddit comments and moderators vs the people who get their info from their TikTok feed, for example - and then this creates marketing profiles and algorithms that then dictate what info gets served to us; before this, the vast majority of people in the UK would watch the BBC and so there wasn't really a BBC "demographic" that you could describe in any particular detail. It was "British person who owns a TV and regularly watches it as their main source of info and entertainment", or virtually every British person.
I don't know where that leaves us.
I guess I'm just going to say that cultural critique is fascinating and all that but it's mostly just a sideshow and the really important stuff is our material reality so, idk, join a party and get involved in your community or spend your time reading theory instead of thinking about what I've said as being anything more than a curious bit of musing rather than (partly) uncovering some deep truth.
The difference is smaller if you consider that when you don't know what you want, you are not getting positive results from using any technology anyway.
So back then when you don't know what you want, you don't get anything. Now you get exhausting useless activities to kill time. You even start killing time you could use better.
I do remember people considered “in the know” were much more savvy with consumer protective information. Reviews were treated as reviews from relative or expert opinion rather than validation of taste. There were also options for children, teens (the magazine “Zillions” for example, my first taste of criticizing capitalism provided by Consumer Reports for kids), adults and the elderly.
Now, there’s a much less robust testing, renting, reviewing and demoing environment it feels.
Give me your downbears all you like: If you’re not old enough to remember having to call friends up using a landline to try and organize anything or just talk, it is nearly impossible to comprehend how much this sucks compared to group chats and texting. Making phone calls suck and I’m so glad I never have to do it anymore.
When you were a kid your friends would be the neighbors due to proximity more than anything else. If you lived in the suburbs your parents probably knew the names and occupations of every person on your street. If you wanted to hang out or play you'd physically walk to the kids house and knock on the door.
When you were older and capable of driving or using other transit by yourself, you'd make plans with people at school, specify a time and place, and then that was pretty much it - you'd go there and have to be punctual and meet them. In contrast plans these days are always temporary and transitory since people can text each other in real time and say they're running late etc.
Wanting to ask a girl out but having to talk to her parents first to get her on the line.
Well, yes, pre-internet is too much. But pre-Web2.0 is just better.
We still remember the ancient ways. If you separate an old from the internet for a few minutes, you can make them recall, though cutting someone off from the internet is torture under the Geneva Conventions.
I remember getting in trouble reading books and pen spinning instead of paying attention in elementary school rather than doing the same with my phone in highschool
Boomers, Gen Xers and elder millennials are now the last people who remember what it was like to use a pay phone, a paper map, a typewriter, etc
idk elder millennials were children pre-internet, their experience isn't going to be the same as gen x or boomers who were adults by the time the internet became so ubiquitous. By the year 2000 there was ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger and texting and Unreal Tournament with online matchmaking. So maybe you werent playing Roblox on your iPad while waiting for your Pizza Hut but you could go home and frag some noobs after eating garlic sticks till you puke in the non-smoking section.
I’ve always argued that it also depended on your economic upbringing. I’m right on the cusp of millennial, but my parents couldn’t afford internet until my junior year of high school. Yeah, the internet existed but it might as well not have, outside of someone bringing halo to school on a usb I missed most of it.
you could, but home internet rates were still pretty low well into the 2000s
Mostly we were LAN cafeing in 2000, broadband wasnt good enough or common enough yet.
$10 overnight LANs were the best.
When I was in high school, one of my friend's family owned a little computer repair shop. We used to take it over on weekends, cannibalize all the display computers for the best parts, and have all night LAN parties. It was pretty rad.
my brain deleted all my archives of playing gameboys (or those weird plastic single-game things), carrying an analog book to IRL read when not home, begging my mom to let me goto the rollerrink, the tall man in the forest, reading MAGAzines, huddling a 22" for the latest episode of whatever weekly shitcom, the phone cable not being long enough to chat outside the kitchen, pogs was before my time but I definitely would have dated a diamond league pog champion, finding a quarter and buying a soda with it, teachers doing nothing about that little shit jeff yanking my hair, doodling in a notebook made from treepulp.
I remember always reading books. Now I read posts from communists sitting on toilets
Now I read posts from communists sitting on toilets
Truly an evolution. Soon we'll read posts from communists sitting on toilets in space!
finding a quarter and buying a soda with it
I remember quarter sodas, so nice. Soda now is like $6 a can so forget it.
They are not six dollars lol. Although $1 cans are a rare find 😔
Those plastic games were probably Tiger handheld games, and they fucking blew
