Nostalgia

AOL is 25 years old today! Twenty Five! To help you understand that, those of you who where alive then click here for the list of number one songs in the charts at the time… Yes, Wham!, Tears for Fears, Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins, Jan Hammer, etc… Do you remember America Online? Dialing up to connect? (Perhaps some of you still dial up, to read this blog?) Ah yes, memories. I was never an AOL subscriber. I was, after all, not in America until the 90s, and only started connecting from home in that decade. By then several companies offered dialup service. Then I was of course, just like everyone else, familiar with the reassuring dialup noises to the point where by ear you could tell if the connection was going to work or not (huh, I just realized that sound is sort of from the same swatch of sounds as the TARDIS noise), and recall the sitting and waiting for files of just a few hundred kilobytes to download, and so on and so forth. (Amazingly, and wonderfully, we are now at the point where people are streaming movies and tv shows directly to their homes on their web connections.) The speed difference became a way of measuring the difference between work and home, in a way. At work, you had tons of storage space and perpetual connectivity, and once got home that went away. So waiting for data to squeeze through the telephone line using dialup was extra frustrating.

Truth be told, there’s a piece of me that does not mind that difference, at times. Being connected all the time at home – fast and conveniently – can bring down the healthy wall between work life and home life. (Even though I have a home office for work activity, I still like to maintain the division between the two.) More and more people are moving to being connected all the time via their phone or other device, which I am partially resisting. (While out there, I check my email using my ipod sometimes when I’ve got a wireless connection, but that’s it – I’m glad to be disconnected from the stream for long periods of being out and about.) I think quiet time is important to remain creative, and, paradoxically you might think, to remain properly emotionally connected to friends and family. At least from observing myself and those around, I see that being connected to everyone all the time (even in principle) pulls you apart – it atomizes you, your time, and your thoughts so that the whole is less than the sum of the parts. That business you see of nobody seeming to have time for anything any more? They skim everything they read (like this blog post), just want the executive summary, need to get to where they’re going in the quickest way possible, can’t commit to an appointment, etc, etc etc.? Rightly, or wrongly, I blame it all (or mostly) on being too connected all the time.

We can’t put the genie back into the bottle, (and I would not want to, since being able to grab data on the hoof is a good thing too) but there’s always the off switch, of course. It’s hard to use sometimes, and of course people now expect (oftentimes require) you to be connected), but I find it helpful to have days where I pretend I’m in dialup mode. In the morning I check my email, answer some of them, check the blog, maybe write a post, and then (once I’ve downloaded things I might need for work or other consumption or productivity), I simply turn off the wireless for a long stretch. Some days it is until a lunchtime check, other days it stays off all the way until the evening. Know what? I’ve not missed a single thing of importance that couldn’t wait several hours, and I can say with certainly that life has been much better without it.

Anyway, back to AOL. Did you know that it was first called Quantum Computer Services? I find that hilarious!

-cvj