Everyone jokes about reading in the bathroom, but it often saved my sanity in an 1100 square foot house. My family lived on top of one another, and the idea of privacy was laughable. The bathroom was the only reliable place no one would walk in on you, make requests, or issue hop to it orders. Reading magazines on the throne was the excuse as to why I was in there 'so long'. My mother actually encouraged reading; she used to walk around the house with scraps of paper in her pockets, so she could bookmark the ten or so books I was reading that routinely littered her tiny house. She bought Time and Sports Illustrated as Christmas gifts for Drake and I for more than 20 years.
I satisfy my craving for the shiny pages by buying used magazines at the Thrift Store Shopping Mall. (We have a 'strip center' about 8 blocks from the Sun City house which is composed entirely of thrift stores. We call the place 'Jan's Amusement Park'.) At least two or three of the stores sell all kinds of used magazines for $.25 each. A year old Allure magazine is how I learned I was out of touch with the beauty world. By sheer chance, I picked up an American Heritage magazine - didn't really pay much attention to how old it was - history doesn't usually change. However, as I was reading along (history of Supermarkets if you want to know), it suddenly dawned on me there were no websites or links to the internet anywhere in the magazine. Guess what the date was of the magazine? 1985!
It started me thinking how much the Electronic Revolution has changed our lives, and how quickly it has happened. Historically speaking, Americans are very, very good at adaptation. Supermarkets are a great example of our adaptation skills. It took less than 20 years for Americans to move away from Mom/Pop grocery stores where food was sold in bulk, packaged for customers, then handed over to them all the while 'running a tab' with the owner. The new supermakets were stores filled with prepackaged goods patrons self selected from aisles of products, brought to one clerk who tabulated the total and collected money for those groceries right on the spot. Several other technologies had to go hand in hand for supermarkets to take hold - also big changes - such as AFFORDABLE home electric refrigeration, economical packaging, and cars to carry home those groceries.
My point is Americans embrace change at a frightening rate of speed. The underlying fear of change is always there even when we are wholeheartedly wallowing in it. The Electronic Revolution certainly qualifies as fast change. The fear of that change is being acted out in our popular culture. We are acting out our fears of the brave new electronic world barreling down on us with visions of violence, end of the world science fiction, and escapism (ie reality TV).
I started getting curious about the electronic timeline. If there were no websites in 1985, then when did they start? So.... I did ONLINE research, of course. Every library worth its salt is busily scanning in information, both past and present, as fast as they can punch buttons. Here's what I found.
1969 - The first internet link is created between two universities in California
1972 - A similar system starts to be used to send emails
1980 - The ethernet cable is introduced. It is still widely used today
1985 - The first .com web address is registered, www.symbolics.com
1986 - The term internet is used as a shortening of internetwork
1990 - Tim Berners-Lee coins the phrase 'world wide web'
April 1993 - Mosaic web browser is launched, displaying text and images together for the first time
June 1993 - The HTML-programming language, which is used to create web pages, is released
1995 - Yahoo is founded and the dot-com boom begins
1996 - Hotmail is launched. There are 342,081 websites online
1998 - Google opens its first office in a garage in California
2001 - Pope John Paul II sends the first papal email
2005 - Video-sharing site You Tube goes live
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Are you freaked out yet? I was. Looking at the significant, albeit, superficial timeline, my first question is 'what's next?'. This timeline also seems to point to the idea one must learn to use electronic devices; otherwise, you could become an anachronism in your own lifetime. For every 'new' device, there are a whole slew of 'things', 'jobs' and even entire industries which no longer exist or which are 'converting to electrons'. Newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, road maps, almanacs, house telephones, film cameras, and wrist watches to name a few. Think about that. Do you know ANYONE under the age of 80 who doesn't own a mobile phone, or a P.C., a laptop, a tablet, or a gaming system? I'm wrapped in electrons, and I love it. As I 'log into' my medical portal, shop, read, research, or stream, sometimes it feels like invisible electrons are connecting my physical person to these devices. Hmmm....perhaps that's what's next. I can imagine it; can't you?
2 comments:
One of the direct benefits to Jan and me of this electronic world is it makes our traveling lifestyle much easier. Most of our personal business communication is now paperless, received via email and account portals. Mail that must remain hardcopy goes to a mail service for scanning or forwarding. Before the web, frequent travelers had to have a trusted family member or friend manage their home mailbox.
We still fight the remnants of the pre-electronic world as organizations cannot yet adjust to our lack of a "permanent address". The next big thing? For me, I want a zip code in cyberspace.
... Drake
The digital world really has made our lives easier. I just hope we are not allowing ourselves as a society to be lulled into a diminished state of being. You know the old saying about boiling a frog- you can boil a frog as long as you start him out in a vat of cold water and gradually increase the temperature. I think it's up to those of us who lived in an earlier time to ensure that our young frogs don't boil.
Post a Comment