Wow, try to find the answer to the question "when did the digital age officially begin" and you'll get all sorts of answers. The best I found was this one on Ask.com:
When Did the Information Age Begin?
Answer: Though there is no exact starting date for the Information Age, the term has been used extensively since the late 1980's and has continued on into the 21st century. The Information Age is also sometimes called the Computer Age.
Having lived through those years and studied computer science waaaaay back when, I can tell you that the only expression I'd heard back in the 80s was the Information Age. And when I recall studying IBM 370 mainframe Assembler using keypunch cards, I have a real hard time thinking of back then as being in the same era with today. I personally tend to think of the digital age as not beginning until the late 90s - when most everyone finally owned or had access to cell phones/PCs, etc. Anyway, the reason I'm thinking about that now is that I've been thinking about things that "go viral" and Andy Warhol's prediction that "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes." Nostradamus could only dream of making a prediction that was so accurate. Post a YouTube video of a spectacular fall or a cute child singing a song or tweet something incredibly insightful or humorous and you have your fifteen minutes. Hell, I saw a tweet that consisted entirely of the word meow hit double digits in retweets. Inevitably, I came around to wondering if something of mine would ever go viral. And all of that reminded me of something that happened in the mid to late-80s.
Life back then must seem pretty primitive to young people today. I had no cell phone, some of our televisions did not have remote controls, and I'd just gotten my first ATM card. I was young, strapped for cash, and lived in an "apartment" with only a toaster oven for cooking and a bathroom sink to do dishes in. In my youthful naivete, I loved it. Then again, we were easily impressed back then. I mean I thought it was great that people no longer had rotary phones, especially after I learned that in some places, the emergency help number was 999! That just seemed cruel to me. I could imagine being hacked apart by a serial killer while waiting for the dial to return so I could dial the second and third nines. Do you have any idea how long it took to dial 999 on an actual dial?
Anyway, my first apartment may have been a bit crude, but I did have cable (although MTV was about the only thing I watched because they actually aired only videos at the time), Nintendo, lots of albums (gasp), CDs and a VCR.
Now, when I was very young, my parents would watch The Rockford Files, and I always thought the fact that he had an answering machine was so cool. Nobody I knew had one - not that I got out much at that age, but it seemed like something out of a science fiction story (give me a break, I was young). Naturally, now that I had my own place, I needed an answering machine. Initially, my boyfriend and I made the typical boring messages, but I soon craved more creativity so I combined two things I liked: music (Black Sabbath) and comedy (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) to make a message that was more my style. I recorded part of the Bridge of Death scene (keep in mind, with the primitive tools available, that meant sitting at a non-distorting distance from the small television speaker with a tape recorder). I only wanted the questions, so I had to play with it quite a bit until I was able to string the dialogue together in a somewhat continuous flow (What is your name? What is your quest? and What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?). I then added my own message using what I hoped was a creepy voice to say "Please leave your name and number at the tone" while the storm at the beginning to the Black Sabbath album played in the background.
Pretty amateurish given what can be done today, but we liked it. And apparently so did other people. Within a few weeks, the machine started receiving hangups. In fact, eventually we would come home to find the machine full almost every day, though we had no idea why. One day, I answered the phone and the surprised person on the other end of the line said, "Oh, sorry, I didn't want to talk to you. I was told to call this number and listen to the message!" At least I finally knew why the machine was filling up. Don't forget that back then, phone service was more expensive. You only had unlimited calling within your area code. I lived in a border town between counties, meaning I had to pay long distance to call friends a few blocks away, so it's actually pretty impressive that we got so many calls. I can't help but wonder if it had been a video on YouTube that got that popular how many views it would have garnered? And like viral videos, I got some hate messages, as well. One caller had mistakenly dialed the number while trying to reach a business and left a scathing "that's no way to talk to customers and do business" message!
So, now that I think about it, things aren't that much different today. The means we use to accomplish tasks has changed, but the overall way in which people seek entertainment hasn't really changed that much. But if Andy Warhol was right, I guess I already had my "fifteen minutes."
No comments:
Post a Comment