It's been 20 years, two entire decades. I spent the summer of 1988 holed up in my room, living on bags of "Cajun Spice" Ruffles chips and ashtrays full of Pall Mall cigarettes, wearing out Steely Dan cassettes in my Walkman. I was connected to the outside world with a Commodore 64 and a 1200 baud modem that was, at the time, considered lightning fast. The online service I used back then was called Q-Link, run by a company called Quantum Computer Services with a destiny that couldn't be contained in 64 kilobytes of random access memory. In 1989, the firm changed its name to America Online.
You could connect with people on Q-Link, in a place called "People Connection." You'd type stuff into a text box, others would too, and occasionally you might find someone who was typing things you found interesting. You could then access their profile with a few keystrokes, and read a list of the things they liked -- movies, bands, books and whatnot. If you liked the same things they did, maybe you'd send them an "instant message," or perhaps an "e-mail." If they reciprocated, they'd be your friend. When you'd hit the send button on your e-mail, the word "MAIL" would flicker on the lower right-hand corner of their screen.
We're now one whole generation removed from the days of Q-Link and bulletin board systems, but the basic architecture of social networking laid down back then has remained virtually intact, even though we've moved from phone lines to wireless fidelity. We got virtual communication right the first time, because nothing in the above paragraph sounds like it happened in a bygone age. It's safe to assume that 20 years from now, we're still going to be sending synchronous and asynchronous personal communications over networks of some kind.
The opportunity for long-distance voiceless chat provides an opportunity for abstraction -- with our big brains and big imaginations, that also seems like something people of all generations like to do. On Q-Link, you could take on the personality of a wizard or a medieval peasant or a rapper (we had those back then) and engage in role-playing games. Or, if you didn't want to go that overboard, you and your friends could play a more everyday form of make-believe. Maybe you'd call your chat room "Corner Bar," and "buy your friends a beer." Here's my all-time favorite example of ASCII art from that era, one that I use whenever I can:
Kyle ----======== cU you
Twenty years later, with all the technological advances we've made, that same sentiment might be expressed like this:
There are people who weren't even born back when the first virtual beers were poured. That makes me think that maybe -- just maybe -- pokes, superpokes, troutslaps and FunWalls tap into needs that have lay dormant within us since the genesis of our species... just waiting to be released and exploited. If Michelangelo, Tesla or Edison had the technological means to build a proto-MySpace or steam-powered Facebook, they probably would have encountered scant market resistance. At the very least, there'd likely be enough early adopters to keep the thing profitable.
So yeah, anyway, I'm back on the FaceBook again. It's not like that's any big news worthy of any sort of announcement. I'm user number (or inmate) 727111904 over there, and I'm able to use my real name only because of the magic that is data binding. I had deactivated my account back in December, I said at the time that it was because of intrusive data-mining practices. The truth was that the constant flow of meaningless everyday information (as well as the internal and external pressures to contribute to it) was making my brain hurt.
A few weeks ago, I put together a "bump list." A wise old basketball coach once imparted to me the importance of staying in touch with as many people as possible every so often, "bumping" them with a message every once in a while to say hello, compliment them on their successes, and inquire about the family. Hidden in every bump, he whispered with a grin, was this tiny invisible message: "Don't forget about me, I'm still alive."
My list, before I gave up, was over 100 people long, and the idea of sending out that many e-mails was completely overwhelming. And that's when I realized, for the first time, the power of modern social networking, and the real differences between 20 years ago and now. Facebook is just one big, endless, 24/7 "bump list."
Social networking isn't exactly a necessary evil, as much as it's a necessary sadness. In past years, I've enjoyed being able to vanish mysteriously at the end of college basketball season in March, only to return in November when the games started up again. I can't afford that old indulgence anymore, disappearing from people's radar screens for months on end. Not like I could 20 years ago, alone in my room with few outside responsibilities or quasi-political obligations. Those days are gone forever, over a long time ago.
