Odd O'blography

Unsocial Media

Approximately a lifetime ago, my uncle Willie gave me a simple four-function pocket calculator with an LED display. It was my personal introduction to the space age, just four years after the first moon landing. My current smart phone is about the same physical size as that pocket calculator but has more computing power than the room-size mainframe computer that I used at college in the late 1970s. I know now that it was as crude as using an abacus, but I felt then as though I were joining the crew of the starship Enterprise.

I won't even try to describe the stone-age programs that we wrote for that Xerox Sigma 7, but I have to say a few words about the ASR-33 teletype machine that freshmen used to communicate with it (green-screen CRT terminals were reserved for upperclassmen). The teletype was a hybrid of the mechanical typewriter and the Morse code telegraph system. Pushing a clunky mechanical key at one teletype would cause a printed letter to appear on the paper in another teletype, or on multiple teletype machines located in newsrooms across the world. That was the original newsfeed, and the chattering sound of the teletype machine accompanied television news programs for many decades. Imagine that chattering sound multiplied by forty. That was the environment in the freshman computing lab. Forty students hammering away at crude keyboards to input data into the mainframe and then reading the output on a continuous roll of paper as it fed through the teletype machine. It wasn't really great for concentration and the amount of wasted paper that merely showed error messages was almost scandalous.

The lowly telephone, invented almost 100 years earlier, provided our link to the space-age technology of Siggy-7 just like it provided the link between newsrooms. Each computer programming session was initiated by dialing into the mainframe and then placing the telephone handset into the rubber cups of an acoustic modem. Remember the cute little beeps and boops that R2D2 used to communicate with C3PO? Well, the teletype machine quite literally talked to the mainframe over a phone line in a similar fashion. Except that the modem tones weren't cute at all. The lunatic squealing and chirping of those modems still haunts my dreams.

Younger folks will be shocked to learn that telephones were once attached to the house. They had to be plugged into a phone jack in the wall to connect to the 'network'. The service was provided by a public utility just like water and electricity. And even though the technology was relatively simple, a human operator was available 24/7 to help a user confused by long-distance dialing. Those old rotary-dial telephones were big and heavy. They were sometimes cast in the role of 'blunt object' in a murder mystery (the only thing you can murder with a smartphone is a person's reputation). The only ‘mobile’ phone I saw as a child had a thirty-foot cord so it could be carried into the next room for privacy. If you were outdoors, or in your car? Then you were out of touch, perhaps for hours. The horror!

Today, nearly everyone posts the excruciating minutiae of their daily lives on the world wide web for anyone to see. They willingly cede all right to privacy in the desperate hope that somebody, somewhere, will ‘like’ them. It wasn’t always so. An early form of social media was called the party line. It consisted of a single telephone circuit that served multiple homes. This was especially common in rural areas, where it was cost prohibitive to run dedicated phone lines to all of the widely separated houses. Each phone was assigned a unique ring code made up of short and long rings. The idea was that each household would answer only when they heard their own ring code. But it was more entertaining to pick up on any ring and catch up on the local gossip. Or pick up at random to see if someone was already on the line. You could listen in on your neighbor as she chatted with Aunt Minnie or hear about her medical issues as she made an appointment with the doctor. Of course, back then people thought it was rude to eavesdrop. There was considerable friction between those who were 'just curious' and those who felt violated by the snooping. Today, people are offended if you don’t pay attention to pictures and posts with intimate details.

Modern apps are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than our ancient Basic programs, and today's ultra hi-res screens can show the most trivial images in beautiful detail. There are thousands of solitaire games and millions of clickbait posts to fill our leisure time without resorting to real-life social interaction. And endless newsfeed items allow for obsessive doomscrolling. But don't forget, even though today's smartphone is primarily used for updating social media, it can also make phone calls to real people. Just like the ASR-33 and Siggy-7, you can literally talk with another human being. Or is it an AI chatbot?

What a difference a generation makes!



Author's Note: ▼

Hey you kids, get off my lawn!!