Life before Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Etc.

[J Route Z]

What on earth was life like before social media? And even the internet?! We are so accustomed to this stuff.

[getemngo]

One of the most bizarre pre-social media phenomena to me is how every personal website had a guestbook. Who thought those were a good idea?

[Laura]

One of the most bizarre pre-social media phenomena to me is how every personal website had a guestbook. Who thought those were a good idea?

Holy crap, I forgot all about those.

I remember finding out about other sites through webrings.

Pre-social media, I remember being social through chat rooms, message boards, AIM, MSN. I like that social media has put a name and more personal aspect to things.

[SSOWorld]

When I was a young kid there were three networks - and PBS and Walter Conkrite was still hosting the CBS Evening News.

[wxfree]

Before the Internet people had other ways to waste time, with video games and television.  People who now work on the Internet had to work with paper.  Porn was on tapes and in plastic-covered magazines, and very much harder to get.

Before social media, few people had any interest in seeing photos of their friends' meals and new shirts.  To me, social media makes it easier to keep up with important, and unimportant, goings on.  I don't see it as a reason to spend less actual time with friends, but there may be people who do.

In sum, I'd say the biggest part of the change in most people's lives is that they waste less time watching television and waste more time reading stories that are specifically picked by a web site to reinforce their preferences and beliefs.

[NE2]

It's called m.t.r.

[Pete from Boston]

You busted your ass and went to the library to find things out.  Now, you sit on your ass and wait for someone to bust their ass and go to the library and find things out, then add it to Wikipedia.

And weird hobbies were just weird, because instant personal validation didn't exist. 

The absence of expectation of personal validation to every thought also meant that people got far less bent out of shape when their feelings/opinions/etc. were questioned.  There was a lot less crying about it.

Mostly, we got by without knowing what every single person we knew had to say. 

[Laura]

And weird hobbies were just weird, because instant personal validation didn't exist.   

Every road enthusiast thought they were the only one until the internet. This is a mega positive change.

[Alex]

We videotaped on most of roadtrips and watched the tapes again and again to get our road fix when we could not travel.

[Dr Frankenstein]

In the early days of the Internet, we had usenet (misc.transport.roads) and IRC for socializing. Then came AIM, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, LiveJournal and MySpace...

Actually, I'm still active on IRC, and I'm still on AIM and YIM although they're pretty dead now.

[Laura]

In the early days of the Internet, we had usenet (misc.transport.roads) and IRC for socializing. Then came AIM, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, LiveJournal and MySpace...

Actually, I'm still active on IRC, and I'm still on AIM and YIM although they're pretty dead now.

I remember how difficult it used to be to communicate internationally 7-9 years ago. One would have to either buy an international calling card or go to an internet cafe to talk via email or YIM. Now, as long as I have wifi, I can facetime and text like normal.

[Pete from Boston]

Communicate internationally?  How about communicating domestically 10-15 years ago?  Buying those stupid usurious calling cards, hunting out payphones, calling some landline voicemail system...

[bing101]

It was cool back then to have cable TV before Youtube, Netflix, Vimeo and Hulu came into play.

[adventurernumber1]

It was cool back then to have cable TV before Youtube, Netflix, Vimeo and Hulu came into play.

That's because back then none of cable TV sucked 

There's still a lot of good stuff on TV now, but speaking for Nickolodeon & Disney Channel for the past few years, crap came flyin right out of the toilet and splattered on the TV screen. Disney Channel has recently taken a politically correct path, and very little on those channels makes me laugh hard anymore anyway. Back when stuff like Drake and Josh aired, that was something to get a bowl of popcorn for 

But nowadays if I want the entertainment I used to get from TV, I just pull up YouTube. I can watch Drake and Josh episodes on there if I can find them, and think about all the glorious road videos you can find on YouTube. That's the place to be now, at least for me. 

[1995hoo]

People had no expectation they'd automatically be able to reach you whenever they wished.

In the 1980s I knew a lot of people who refused to leave messages on answering machines. Heck, my parents did not buy an answering machine until 1990, when my mom was transferring from a part-time to a full-time teaching position and needed to respond to a call from the school system within 24 hours....but the day they called was the one day we were at home in the middle of two weeks of travel! My mom grumbled about that and noted they'd wasted the money on the machine.

Finding out about stuff like upcoming concerts was a pain in the arse. You had to get lucky to hear an announcement on the radio, see an ad in the newspaper, or hear about it from a friend. Then you'd have to go to the shopping mall god-awful early in the morning to line up outside Hecht's, or else go camp out at the venue's box office.

Watching sports on TV was a lot harder than it is today. Nowadays we take it pretty much for granted that all your local teams' games will be on TV. In the 1980s that was true only for the NFL (unless the local team didn't sell out, in which case games were blacked out). For the other sports, even the ones who had games carried on what we now call regional sports networks usually didn't have all the games available on TV. If you didn't have cable (we didn't until December 1986), you could only watch whatever games were carried on free TV (here in the DC area, that meant you got 20 Capitals road games a year on independent station WDCA-20, plus road playoff games), and you had to listen to the radio for the rest (or go to the home games, which my parents refused to do on school nights).

Recording TV shows required knowing how to program your VCR, and every VCR was different. The worst part was if you were going out of town and wanted to record shows on different channels while you were away because back then almost every cable company required the use of a cable box, and most VCRs were unable to control the cable boxes until the early 1990s. Cable boxes also generally prevented you from watching one program while recording another unless you acquired two cable boxes and set up a parallel connection (preferably with a switch box; my dad set up an A/B/C switchbox, but we didn't have two cable boxes–instead, one connection was to the rooftop antenna to pull in stations cable didn't carry, one was to the cable box, and the third was to the Intellivision). Remote controls were new, so to get one for the cable box you usually had to rent a remote from the cable company. (My parents refused to do this, so to change the channel we had to get up and walk over to the TV, just like on our older black-and-white TV from the 1970s with the two knobs for changing the channel.) We didn't have a color TV until 1978 or 1979 because my father thought it was a waste of money.

On the other hand, learning things like the library card catalog meant we learned how to alphabetize properly (compare to way too many young people today who, based on using iTunes, seem to think "Bruce Springsteen" should be alphabetized under "B" instead of under "S").

[jeffandnicole]

Social networking was alive and well back in the 80's.  When I was over at a friends house and it was dinner time, my mom would just go into the backyard and yell over to me, 3 or 4 houses away.  Thus, everyone in the neighborhood knew exactly when we were eating dinner.

In college was the first time I connected with anyone that enjoyed roads as much as I did.  Actually, a few people really.  They don't maintain the same interest as I do now because other things take up their time...like kids and such...but when we get together at least a short period of time will be devoted to various construction projects and such.

Even when a lot of the first social stuff came out - AIM, etc, I never really used it.  Who was I going to chat with...and what about?  Roads?  No one cared!  Other than Facebook, I don't utilize social media. I have a youtube account with 1, maybe 2 videos.   I may have a twitter account; again never used. 

I created my own website which was mostly my personal 'favorites' which I could access anywhere at any time.  After I transferred it from my dialup host (jersey.net) to Comcast, some of the formatting changed and I never did update it.  But, I still use it to this day.  It was easily accessible from the web (yahoo, alta vista) by typing in my name.  Last time I tried finding it on Google, I couldn't locate it after searching the first several pages.

And weird hobbies were just weird, because instant personal validation didn't exist.   

Every road enthusiast thought they were the only one until the internet. This is a mega positive change.

I still hide! :-)  But this is extremely true.  Actually, I'm still a little pissed at my mom because she was a librarian, and probably could've informed me about the regional planning commission in the area (DVRPC) that may have provided the library information regarding upcoming projects and such.  I only found out about this (and nearly everything else road related) after the internet came about.

[NE2]

That's because back then none of cable TV sucked 

There's still a lot of good stuff on TV now, but speaking for Nickolodeon & Disney Channel for the past few years, crap came flyin right out of the toilet and splattered on the TV screen.

Actually you're just gotten older. People tend to love what they watched as kids and hate what's on the kids channels later.

[algorerhythms]

What on earth was life like before social media? And even the internet?! We are so accustomed to this stuff.

Dinosaurs roamed the earth. They were cancelled in 1994, though.

[cjk374]

(preferably with a switch box; my dad set up an A/B/C switchbox, but we didn't have two cable boxes–instead, one connection was to the rooftop antenna to pull in stations cable didn't carry, one was to the cable box, and the third was to the Intellivision).

Wow!  Thank to the internet, I just found out that my family wasn't the only ones who played on an Intellivision!  Best gaming system EVER!

That's because back then none of cable TV sucked 

There's still a lot of good stuff on TV now, but speaking for Nickolodeon & Disney Channel for the past few years, crap came flyin right out of the toilet and splattered on the TV screen.

Actually you're just gotten older. People tend to love what they watched as kids and hate what's on the kids channels later.

Sad but true for all of us NE2.



I was going outside and playing when I was growing up.  You were usually thrown out of the house by your mom and MADE to play outside.  "Social" meant actually visiting, in person, friends and family.  Lots has changed over the last 40 years of my living...with plenty more to come.

[formulanone]

What on earth was life like before social media? And even the internet?! We are so accustomed to this stuff.

Dinosaurs roamed the earth. They were cancelled in 1994, though.

Good puppet-based entertainment is hard to find nowadays.

You could learn a lot from actually talking to people, or if nobody around you knew, you discovered information, photos, films, and things for yourself. You didn't always wait to see what anyone thought of things or places, you just did them if you felt adventurous or plucky. I think people were a little more patient then, too. You'd actually wait to find things out, instead of the endless teasing and backchannel discussion...TV seems to do this as well over the years; there's dozens of hours per week of pre/post-game discussion for a three-hour game. There's not enough alcohol in the world to make that interesting! And if you wanted to see where the road goes and what it looks like, you drove there.

On the other side of things, you kept up with people distant to you via letters or postcards. You can keep up with distant relatives and friends like never before. Phone calls could get expensive, but I think I valued the phone time more because you might use it less than today's ubiquity of communication devices. Dang, film was expensive. Not everything was better then.

It kind of balances out. I'm not a big fan of the over-sharing with Facebook or Twitter; I do more reading than typing, as not every mundane thing needs discussion. To each his own, though.

[english si]

Communicate internationally?  How about communicating domestically 10-15 years ago?  Buying those stupid usurious calling cards, hunting out payphones, calling some landline voicemail system...

Jeepers Beepers! were all pay phones card-only?

I remember phone cards, and I remember them totally failing over here - you had pay phones that accepted coins and they gradually rolled out ones where you could also pay by card. Where there was clusters of boxes they typically had only one that allowed coins in order to try and get people to use cards, but most people queued for the coin operated one (or just used office or home phones) and BT gave up on the phonecard thing.

And 10-15 years ago was as recent as 1999-2004. Mobile phones were pretty common by 1999, and ubiquitous by 2004 (I know America love the beeper and held cellphones at bay for a little bit longer, but not that much!)

In the UK, many rural pay phones are still marked on OS maps. In the Scouts I once did an activity where they gave us a map of a nearby set of villages and the aim was to get the phone number of as many phoneboxes as possible - armed with a tub of 10p (or was it 20p by then?) coins we had to ring a number when we got to the box to pass on the information there, rather than write it down, so they could check we were alright. While each team had at least one mobile, signal wasn't as good back then.

Dinosaurs roamed the earth. They were cancelled in 1994, though.

Which was a real shame for the people who opened that dinosaur safari park on a remote island in 1993. I was impressed by the feature length ad they put in the cinemas, and would have gone if dinosaurs weren't canceled.

It was a weird ad though - they focused on their dangerous carnivores and the ways they could kill you rather than the safe ones that were really tall or had three horns.

[1995hoo]

(preferably with a switch box; my dad set up an A/B/C switchbox, but we didn't have two cable boxes–instead, one connection was to the rooftop antenna to pull in stations cable didn't carry, one was to the cable box, and the third was to the Intellivision).

Wow!  Thank to the internet, I just found out that my family wasn't the only ones who played on an Intellivision!  Best gaming system EVER!

....

Heh. My brother still has our Intellivision, and it still works. He found it in our parents' basement, took it back to his apartment, and hooked it up. He sent me this picture earlier this year when he was playing Bump n Jump. The graphics are archaic, but you know, those games were fun.

[Pete from Boston]

Payphones were not card-only, bur long-distance calls (more than a few miles) were much cheaper with a card.  You called a free number and entered your code. 

In my basement I have not only an Atari (there was no silly "2600" in those days) but a PCjr!  I should break them out for a test.

Not surprisingly, I am deep in the social-media-is-the-opposite-of-social camp.  I like looking people in the eye when being social.

[formulanone]

In my basement I have not only an Atari (there was no silly "2600" in those days) but a PCjr!  I should break them out for a test.

My PCjr died of a mysterious garbled-character problem back in 1993. It was impossible to read anything on the screen unless it was using a cartridge game which only used its impressive graphics. (Touchdown Football and some Paint program were the only things left.)

Haven't fired up the Atari 2600 VCS in a few years.

[cjk374]

(preferably with a switch box; my dad set up an A/B/C switchbox, but we didn't have two cable boxes–instead, one connection was to the rooftop antenna to pull in stations cable didn't carry, one was to the cable box, and the third was to the Intellivision).

Wow!  Thank to the internet, I just found out that my family wasn't the only ones who played on an Intellivision!  Best gaming system EVER!

....

Heh. My brother still has our Intellivision, and it still works. He found it in our parents' basement, took it back to his apartment, and hooked it up. He sent me this picture earlier this year when he was playing Bump n Jump. The graphics are archaic, but you know, those games were fun.

I never had that game.  My favorites were Maze-a-Tron (based on the original TRON movie), Night Stalker, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, B-52 Bomber, and Astrosmash.