Many years ago, I finally caved and bought a Nokia phone I didn't think I even needed because it came with a free discman. It had snake, and about 10 emojis from memory. You had to keep texts very short as you paid for each one. The discman took AA batteries. I burnt a lot of CD's, the name of the band in permanent marker.
Ringtones cost us money.
When I went travelling in 2001 I didn't even think to take it with me. We used Easy Everything internet cafes and paid by the 15 minute blocks to email people and find out when the trains were leaving. We printed maps.
When I got my folks to sent the phone to Berlin, realising it might be useful after all, I texted Dad to let him know - what a miracle I could send him a message across the world. His response was the sparse 'ok' which made me laugh - the 2001 version of π used by boomers everywhere.
When I got home I had been gifted Dad's old computer (he used them for drafting, as he was early on the Autocad scene) which was used mainly for finding pirate music and emails. The dial up modem screeched. We worried about downloading viruses with our music. It was also for MSN messenger which seemed like a bloody miracle as I could message travelling buddies from Yucatan to Dublin. I ran up an $800 phone bill to the UK texting Jamie, who I'd just met. I think I just skipped town on that one.
When I did my Arts degree I'd order books from the online uni library and they'd arrive in a post pack. I made a website all about witches. There were a lot of cool websites of 1 to 10 pages in the '90's.
When I moved to the UK I had a digital camera. The SD card would hold about 40 photos and the battery ran out quickly. We had flip phones for a while. I can't recall the first time we had a phone camera. I remember a photo of my nephew coming through via email. It took a long time for a photo to load and I saw his forehead, then his blue eyes, then his chin. I had a Myspace for a minute. I could listen to Melbourne radio in England, but only in real time.
We had a lot of USB sticks, CD's, and mini discs. We threw out the cassettes. We still went up the shop every Saturday for the newspaper and our second hand goods came from the Friday Ads in UK or later The Trading post. Software was downloaded via CDs.
By 2009 we reluctantly signed up for Facebook, as Jamie's sister had begged us to, suggesting we were behind. I bought an iphone. My son had an ipod for his music but I had a Creative Zen which held a whole 20 gb of music, and my husband and I both had minidisc players which we thought were amazing. Like the cassettes of the '80's and '90's, we got busy recording music to listen to in the car via a Belkin radio transmitter. We were still getting DVDs from the video shop - 5 for $10, which was usually 1 new release and four weeklys, and we'd usually find some pretty cool art house films. We watched the whole of the Sopranos on DVD in the bus connected to a solar panel and battery. Jamie said that soon you'd be able to view movies to rent on the internet. I was amazed enough I could order Netflix CD's via the post.
My first Instagram post was of harvested wild apples. Borders were all the rage. We connected to strangers all over the world through single photographs.
Then there was online shopping and paying for streaming services, and 'google' became a verb. You could still read independent reviews, for a while. Battery and data storage got better, and then we had cloud storage and smart TVs and our phone cameras replaced digital cameras. We marvelled at e-readers and digital paper. Music could be streamed online. We could video call on Skype.
We stopped bothering with travel agents and booked flights ourselves online. We had Zoom meetings. QR codes. Crypocurrency.
And we stopped searching for information because it searched for us in the form of data mining, pop ups, algorithms. People didn't write blogs, they created content.
Our phones filled with apps, and filled with apps, and filled with apps. We could scan documents with our camera. We didn't need to read maps because Google did it for us: turn left here. We stopped asking people for directions. We ordered food to our doorstep, groceries too. We had Tap and Go, online banking, smart watches, wireless headphones.
Then we had AI. For everything. The internet started to die, the human, messy, lovely part of it. Facebook became a way to divide us, full of bots, skewing politics and connections between people, and selling, selling, selling. Everything has become Ai chat bots, Ai agents, Ai art - far beyond the strange horror of anticipated deep fake. We don't know who to trust and trust things that aren't real and we have stopped caring. If we can make money out of it, we do. We are meant to appreciate Ai art and be moved to tears by Ai music.
We are told it is the future. We never knew we needed artificial literature, movies, actors, music, but now we should feel lucky to have them, and pay subscriptions to be able to use them.
We had tech we didn't know we needed. Tech we didn't ask for. Tech I couldn't even imagine when I reluctantly bought that Nokia in '99.
The Discman was pretty cool though.
