Unlike the lib OP, I’m not trying to quit my phone. As if.
Finally I get to be interesting :grillman:
I can tell you tales of life not just before smartphones but before the internet itself.
First off, cell phones themselves were a pretty disruptive shift. You used to call your friends on a land line, agree to meet them somewhere, and then wait for them to show up. They’re not there after 10 minutes? No clue why. How long do you wait?
We had answering machines, if someone wanted to talk to you they had to call and leave a message, which was recorded on cassettes. Every so often you would have to change or rewind the tape.
I was a child during this time but as an adult with a cell phone now I imagine there were good and bad parts. Being reachable 24/7 makes work much more intrusive. But being able to know where your loved ones are at any time gives peace of mind.
on to smartphones… life before was not that much different. A lot of the benefits were already in different places, the cell phone just centralized them. Everyone had mp3 players, people had garmin/tomtom gps in their cars. The latter was a real game changer. Before gps you would have to look up the address to a place, write down directions, and hope you didn’t miss a turn. Before the internet you had to have maps. One of the companies was called key maps, it was like a hyper detailed book of maps with an index for every street in a geographic area.
Having said that there was less portability. Shitty restaurants got a lot more business, there was no yelp. On foot it was very easy to get lost. Asking people for directions was pretty common, even the cliche trope of pulling into a gas station to ask where’s the highway.
For contacts you would have numbers memorized, or for less used ones actually written down on cards. One company specializing in this was Rolodex.
People watched a LOT more TV. Like every waking hour was occupied by it. So this idea that we were some erudite society of scholars before the smartphone came around and ruined it all is just bullshit.
When you weren’t at home though you’d be bored a lot. Waiting was boring. That’s the biggest difference, we are never bored any more. If you went to the bathroom without a magazine you’d have to read the back of the shampoo bottle for entertainment.
For teenagers porn was a precious commodity. You had one, maybe 2 magazines that you either found or stole, and were intimately familiar with their contents. There were naughty channels that broadcast over the air but were scrambled, you could watch that and occasionally spot a titty.
One time there was some technical glitch that caused the spice channel feed to come in clear. I was like the road runner in how fast I found a tape and vhs’ed it. Probably recorded over my first communion or something lol.
That tape was among my most precious possessions. I wonder what happened to it.
That one porn magazine your cousin stole from his folks or something, it wasn't actually clear where it came from but you left it in the forest because that was like the one place adults didn't venture.
I've seen others refer to this phenomena as 'forest porn'
I’ve seen others refer to this phenomena as ‘forest porn’
Ah yes a magical feat lost from this mundane world. As a teenager you used to be able to traverse the woods and find pornos left by the fae but alas, since man has encroached on the forest realm and angered the spirits that magic has long since been lost from this world.
Sometimes you would be out walking and stumble upon someone else’s forest porn, that was like finding gold
Me and a friend found a tree house with porn plastered all over the interior walls and ceiling.
For teenagers porn was a precious commodity.
i remember i had like 3 pages torn from some hustler. it wasnt even good shit, i think it was like the ads in the back mostly.
Be grateful for the things you had. At least you were not forced to resort to your mom's sears catalogs.
Ya once in a blue moon one would come in and it was like Christmas. I was too chicken to ever keep them or hide them though lol.
oh i definitely kept them shits haha. i honestly dont think my mom even shopped with them. or maybe i just want to believe that haha.
One more: texting was a PAIN IN THE ASS. The first widespread phone was the old Nokia bricks, you had the number pad plus 2 extra buttons I think. When you wanted to text you would have to press the number for the corresponding letter however many times (so like for A you would push 1 once or for C 3 times, etc). When they introduced T9, the first predictive texting with a dicitionary, that was probably the most meaningful change in my interaction with technology, it was a game changer. Of course now trying to go back and use T9 is excruciating, to think it used to be much, much worse
Lol i forgot you had to pay for them. But you’re absolutely right. Then text speech made it’s way onto AIM
There was a very short-lived golden age in the heyday of flip phones with hard keys and T9 dictionaries where you could actually text and drive without taking your eyes off the road for an instant.
one of my first cellphones was a slide phone with a full keyboard. i could text on that motherfucker without even looking at it, perfectly. i can almost do it with smartphones if the screen is clear and i've gotten used to it, but having a tactile keyboard was a gamechanger
You literally didn't even need to remove the thing from your pocket.
i was a master at casually getting it under my desk
now you can pull a smartphone out in a meeting and no one bats an eye
and if you lived in the US and had poor parents, texting was NOT FREE
If you went somewhere you had to take a camera. Before digital cameras it was film, and you had only so many pictures, so you had to be judicious. Every once in a while somebody would put a finger over the corner of the lens while shooting, which wasn’t visible in the view finder. So you’d get a big flesh blob in the upper right corner. This happened so often it was a dad joke trope.
If you were on vacation and forgot a camera they actually sold disposable film cameras. They would take shit pictures and the prices were extortionate.
People would collect their best pictures and put them in photo albums. These were like big books with thick sticky pages and film covers. You’d peel back the film and stick on the photo and cover it. They were prized possessions.
Kodak built an entire business on selling photographic film, billions of dollars, industrial giant. They totally missed the transition to digital and basically went bankrupt. No idea what they do now, but it used to be a household name.
Kodak basically took the city of Rochester down with the ship. The folks up there are wonderful but the town is a shell of what it was. It was once basically a mini silicon valley, Bausch and Lomb of the eyeglass and lense fame, Kodak with cameras, Xerox with copiers, and basically all the industry needed to support those global giants. Anything optical owes a great debt to Lil ole Rochester.
You'll still find weird old office machines with "Rochester, NY" in the casting if you know where to look.
There's shitty people everywhere but I ran into way more nice people in Rochester.
you had only so many pictures, so you had to be judicious
I don't even know what film rolls cost, I just know my parents dragged feet for months on getting new ones if I ran out :deeper-sadness:
For better or worse, yes. It’s funny watching Seinfeld or something now probably half of the bits just wouldn’t happen anymore bc of smart phones.
I remember when Seinfeld still airing new episodes. Looking back, it seems like such a different world that it's hard to imagine I grew up in it.
Shitty restaurants got a lot more business
I think you're underestimating how many people will give 5 stars to a plate with literal shit on it
There are so many local pizza places where half the reviews are like "this place gives you the most cheese, 5 stars" and it's the worst pizza in the world. I once got pizza from such a place (only place in a small town I was passing through) and there was so much cheese the dough under the cheese hadn't cooked because the heat couldn't get to it. Took one but and threw it out.
For teenagers porn was a precious commodity. You had one, maybe 2 magazines that you either found
in the woods!
There used to be a whole section in the bookstore for books to keep in the bathroom, so you could read funny stories or trivia while shitting.
unfolding and holding a large sheet of paper called a "map" in your hands
I remember my parents goofing around with those things when traveling for out of town stuff
I remember how when I was going somewhere with my mum I would be the navigator and keep track of where we were on the big paper map. It was more fun but less convenient than a GPS.
I loved it when my parents would go out for the evening because that's when HBO would show movies with a little bit of nudity.
Once I watched a whole feature length movie because it promised full frontal nudity and all it had was a flaccid penis in the final scene.
:deeper-sadness:
rewinding video tapes to avoid getting a fine from blockbuster
I remember having a video rewinder on top of the VCR as a kid. Rewound tapes super fast but a lot of people were under the impression that it would damage the tape if you used it (it didn't).
Recalling all the times my parents screamed at me I was wasting my time with video games, then they'd go watch football on TV for 4 hours.
But tv was only at the homes. what about on the bus? In school/work? While walking?
What did you doooooooooooo
2000s zoomer
In school we did schoolwork. During lunch we’d play on the playground.
On the bus I’d talk to my friends or if they weren’t there I’d just sit silently
While walking I talked to my friend or walked home alone.
Back then no one really talked to each other outside of school and social media (yahoo, facebook, Snapchat) unless you were close friends. At least in my experience.
If you did hang out, it was usually video games if it was guys. Maybe sports if you’re into that. But coed groups it was mostly being outside or at the mall
I didn’t work
When I was with my cousins we’d play with legos, make guns out of the big legos and play soldier, play tag and hide and seek or board games. Sometimes sleep over.
I would say things were more social back then even if you weren’t really doing anything together like talking on Facebook. I haven’t been back to any elementary or high schools so I can’t tell you if everyone is sitting in the cafeteria on their phone or what.
Talk or listen to our walkman/discman/ipod. Play Gameboy. Read books.
For a brief period of time between flip phones and the iPhone we would share meme photos and porn on the ipod color
A lot of the time you just did nothing. There was more ambient boredom that you just had to deal with.
I had a CD player so I could listen to music while on the bus or walking. In school we talked to friends, played card games (usually with a standard deck of cards, although sometimes someone would have an Uno deck) read books (well, I did this, and a few others did, but most people did not read books during free time at school), or, when possible, used a computer to surf online.
Newspapers.
They came out fresh every day, and were a quarter. And the best part was, after someone was finished with it, someone else could read that same newspaper. And afterwards, you could use it to wrap fish or line the bottom of a birdcage.
calling mom to get on mapquest cuz my directions to the show in the city were wrong and now i don't know where i am
When I was a kid and we were relatively poor, flying to Florida was out of the question for vacation so my mother printed out a list of directions from Mapquest to get us exactly where we needed to go. As a 12 year old, it was a big responsibility having to navigate us to Florida without veering off into a strange place. I'm pretty good at navigation at this point though so who knows.
Also remember having to call someone to look up directions on the computer because I got lost accidentally going to New York City rather than a city right outside of NYC. Had to tell them the closest intersection as my friends and I were panicking unsure how to get out of Newark.
Most people sat around endlessly changing channels trying to find someone to watch on the tv.
It got so bad that they had to make a channel that browses the channels for you, it was called the TV Guide channel. Then they realized people spent so much time watching that channel that they started putting content on the TV guide channel, like Joan Rivers on the red carpet and stuff. It kind of ended up looking like those ADHD videos that have endless run games and ASMR in the corner.
Your comment really is so profound. The TV Guide really was the Minecraft parkour videos framing the actual content for Gen X
Also: I didn't really experience this, but one thing I've heard from older people is that fashion travels much more quickly. Fashion trends used to start in some hot place in New York or LA, then a couple of years or months later would move to other coastal cities and into suburbs, but it wouldn't reach middle America until much later. You could go from New York to the midwest and feel like you traveled back in time ten years because the fashion seemed so out of date. Nowadays you can go to like rural South Dakota and the girls might dress like NYU students.
This is very true. My cousin lived in Philadelphia and I lived in the Midwest. I knew that whatever she was wearing, we'd be wearing in a year or two.
I feel like this still happens by accident. I knew a family from NY who moved to the Pittsburg area like 15+ years ago. Somehow they're stuck in the 2011 era of scene and emo trends. Its the weirdest thing to see, like they moved and just froze in time.
Yes. Awesome. Finally going to get a scene GF. I've been waiting for this.
On the other hand, there's less distinctiveness in fashion between eras. Everything since 2008 or so feels same-y.
there’s still distinct micro-trends i’d say. you’ve got the true religion chief keef swag era type fashion from the early 2010s, affluent white boys wearing vineyard vines and patagonia in the mid 2010s, when i was in high school a bunch of girls used to wear the sweatshirt + leggings/yoga pants combo with socks pulled over their pants which i don’t think i’ve seen in a really long time, and countless others but i don’t think anything of that existed before 2008 and a lot of stuff has definitely fallen out of popularity since
i’d agree though that as a whole though fashion seems same-y and nowhere near as distinct as it was decades prior. probably due to the rise of “fast fashion”, the spread of the internet essentially killing monoculture in general, and mainstream cultural stagnation
Redscarepod is a bad place to be if you value your mental health fuck that place
You had to carry a lot more shit around with you, especially on vacation. If you were traveling, you might carry a still camera, a video camera, a Gameboy (or the like), a book or two, a CD player, your physical plane tickets, and so on (plus, toward the end, a device that did nothing but make and receive phone calls). The sheer number and variety of devices and objects that have been subsumed into the smart phone is absolutely mind-blowing when you really tally them all up--I walk out my front door every morning with what would have been a suitcase full of shit in 1990 in my front pocket.
The shittiest change is by far the expectation of connectivity. There's a pervasive demand--both in your personal life and your professional life--that you be reachable at pretty much any time. Not responding to a text or an email within a few hours is unusual to the point of warranting an explanation for at least some people sometimes. Your job can (and will) expect you to always be a phone call away.
I used to spend a lot more time reading books, but I also used to waste a lot more time mindlessly watching TV, so that's probably a wash.
TV was a little different in Denmark. People watched a lot of TV here as well but we didn't have the number of channels that Americans had. Unless you paid good money for a satellite dish (my parents did not) you were stuck with one (later two) domestic channels and three German or Swedish channels, depending on how far away from the border you lived.
This meant that everyone watched the same things all the time. Popular TV series could empty the streets and when making smalltalk you could assume that people had watched the same shows that you had. Around midnight programming would end and they would broadcast a test image until the next afternoon.
Everybody watching the same thing also meant that people would get very opinionated about things they didn't like as they couldn't just watch something else. Television and the alleged socialist leanings of "the red henchmen" at the state broadcaster became a staple of right wing culture war tantrums.
The one or two channels had no target demographic as they had to send something for everyone. News, documentaries, talkshows, films, youth programmes, children's programming and sports all had to fit in the same channel.
As s kid that meant that cartoons were a special thing. You only had 20 minutes of domestic or Scandinavian children's programming each day and an hour of classic American animation on weekend mornings. Later on you also got a weekly broadcast of Disney cartoons on Friday night. That broadcast dovetailed perfectly with Scandinavian mixed candy culture and eating "Friday candy" while you watched Disney cartoons became a fixture of everyday life for families. Despite the outdated format the Disney broadcast was so popular that they kept sending it until the turn of this year.
One argument anti-communists in Poland use is the amount of TV channels we've gained after 1989. No fucking joke, they literally use that shit as it's the sole quantifier of quality of life. „Oh back then you had to wait for a Wieczorynka (evening cartoon) and now look how many cartoon channels children have!”, forgetting the fact that they shit on them non-stop for being low quality while constantly praising Krecik, Sąsiedzi, Smerfy, Miś Uszatek, Reksio and the like as being actually educational to children.
The wierdest part is how they argue that „everyone knew that TV was soulless propaganda filled with lies in PRL” adding to that somehow, someway private TV stations are not propaganda. The only TV station that is recognized country wide as propaganda, is the state run station TVP. Not just because it is state run, but in my opinion that contributes to the stigma it has with liberals.
I'll also add that I hate it when I praise PRL for what it had only to be blasted with:
„But have you considered 1891 stan wojenny no toilet paper food stamps no jeans no dollars for pewex only 2 tv channels no mercedes no bananas no oranges?”
Sorry for the tangent, just made a connection between how our countries weren't that different from each other yet in the mind of Solidarność chuds we were some kind of backwater.
The radio is similar, in that everyone listened to the stations you had access to. Especially for the older generation. Now there are so many choices on the modern net that it would honestly surprise me if anyone born after the year 2005 has heard the same songs as other kids.
Any time not taken up by smartphones was occupied by television.
We watched a lot of television. And it was utter crap. I remember watching The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and some other show on reruns every night. Kids watched cartoons like Transformers and He-Man which were just half-hour long commercials for lines of toys. Star Trek was great but there were only so many episodes so we watched them over and over. I used to go to the actual library and check out books, something that ensured my teens and 20s would be spent as a miserable, suicidal incel (I got better). Up until about 2004, I had a little list I kept in my wallet of people's phone numbers. If you didn't know someone's phone number, you could go to the phone book and literally look them up. That's right, there was this gigantic book printed on thin paper with everyone's name and number in it, in alphabetical order. If that sounds like a huge privacy violation, the technology to abuse it didn't exist. The movie "Terminator" (1984) has a scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger tracking down Sarah Connor by finding her name and address in the phone book.
I used to go to the actual library and check out books, something that ensured my teens and 20s would be spent as a miserable, suicidal incel (I got better)
what does this mean?
You think that teenagers who voluntarily spend time in the library are popular with girls?
No. I can assure you that this is not the case.
In my 30s, due to the complete breakdown and destruction of my old life, I was able to find self-confidence in overcoming the carnage. Afterwards, rebuilding my shattered life, I was finally able to have the experiences most people have in high school. And I haven't set foot in a library since then.
not "popular with girls’ in high school is a far cry from just making you default an incel
I didn't lose my virginity until the humiliatingly late age of 31.
Honestly, the smartphone boundary sucks. Peak technology was the power of computers and cellphones but not smart phones. I think for those of who liked to be on the computer and internet, the aughts was a golden era that will never be replicated or re-experienced by any other generation.
I think a part of smartphones worsening our lives is that we now have constant distraction devices, which are also constant notification influx and availability devices, which is just not that great for the mind. Especially the availability aspect. Being online before the smartphone tended to be a binary thing. You're either online, or you're offline and unavailable. With smartphones I can send a message or call to anyone, or anyone to me, and the expectation is that that message will be received immediately. Sometimes, even, replied to immediately. You're not available sometimes, but all the time. That sucks.
I think the other part of it is that smartphones have incredibly powerful UX, and I'm sure both Apple and Google have invested ungodly amounts of money in researching UI/UX for these things. So that means the barrier to entry for non-computer-savvy people has plummeted to almost nothing. Having these kinds of people online, IMO, makes being online less fun.
That said, the smartphone as a technology is incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, the computer industry also course-corrected their earlier error with computers and made sure that these devices are also advertising vehicles that you have minimal control over, so smartphones are particularly evil (btw have you heard of our Lord and Savior Linux?)
Peak technology was the power of computers and cellphones but not smart phones.
I'd argue early smart phones should be included with peak. Once everyone had a smart phone, social media became too ubiquitous and everything needed a useless app filled with dark patterns/microtransactions is about when things went on decline.
When the first iPhone was released it didn't even have an app store until iPhone OS 2, so the earliest smart phones were held back the lack of developers, the lack of a way to write software, the time it took to come to some kind of understanding on how to write software for mobile (a brand new paradigm), and the lack of adoption among users.
So yeah, for a couple of years smart phones were a bit of a novelty item. And of course the thing that a lot of armchair nerds really derided them on was the fact that they didn't have physical keys! "You can pry my Blackberry out of my cold dead hands." Imagine trying to make that complaint today.*
*Though the touch screens on the early devices were not as good as on today's phones, so the criticism had a little bit of merit.
My first Android phone, a used Samsung Stratosphere, had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. I remember touch screens being terrible in the halcyon days of early smartphones and having one with a physical keyboard, or at least a 0-9 keypad, was a perk for a time.
When my Stratosphere finally broke in like 2013 or 2014 I was bummed out because there weren't any new phones like it with physical keyboards. But by that time touch screens had gotten better, so a physical keyboard wasn't really needed anymore.
Early touchscreens were dogshit. Like 100ms+ of latency and the software was terrible at trying to figure out which link you were tapping, etc
I’ve never had a smartphone. I live in an occasionally blissful parallel universe that’s frequently interrupted by spiteful raids against my way of life.
If you wanted delivery, your only option was pizza. Everywhere else you had to call for takeout, and then go pick it up.
Honestly day to day life wasn't much different. The best part was that when you left school or work, you were fucking gone until the next day. The worst part was that if your friend or whoever you wanted to hang out with wasn't there when you called/came by, they were fucking gone until further notice.
Biggest difference by far was boredom. People are bored now flipping through social media feeds, but that's a pretty high bar compared to being bored and staring at the wall in the doctor's office or DMV or wherever you are.
People probably talked to each other more just because when there's nothing else to do it becomes inevitable that some people will roll the dice of turning to a stranger and making small talk. I don't miss the small talk, but I do miss banter at work - I still do it a bit but definitely a lot less than I used to. A chud would probably blame sexual harrassment laws for that particular change, but I'm pretty sure it's electronic devices dividing everyone's attention and atomizing them that caused it.
I vehemently opposed getting a smartphone until 2014 or so, because I knew what it would do. Fried my brain, no attention, constantly listening to podcasts, no longer reading, no longer energy for seeing people, my sleep changed.
:horror: :wonder-who-thats-for:
Same. I'm still stubborn when it comes to upgrading phones.
And gaming? If you were stuck on a level that was it. Maybe hope an older sibling can help you out. I remember all the guys from my class rushing to hang out at one kids home, because he had beaten a difficult boss and finally reached the next level.
If you had a dial-up connection, there were a ton of video game walkthroughs online even in the 90s. Still, there'd be those times where you're at the beach or the playground with some kids you've never met before and they clue you in about the secret exit to some StarFox level.
if you had an interest you would just naturally subscribe to a magazine that covered that interest
I think Parenti said something like most of those are just consumer habits. (damn sorry to butcher Parenti)
