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    Thoughts on changing technology…and how it affects how we dated then and now…

    8/29/2012
    Audio tape born in 1961 killed by the compact discDo you remember the mixed tape? Go on, you must! If you don’t you are probably aged under 30. Lucky you!!

    Remember when you used to be in love with someone and they’d send you a mixed tape? Or you’d spend hours and hours making them one…such fun! It wasn’t that long ago really…like the ’90’s. Technology has changed so much in a short time.

    Remember when no one had a mobile phone? My husband had one of the very early ones for his job, it was hilariously big but we thought it was so fancy. He had a pager as well. The only place I see pagers now is on The Wire re-runs.

    In one of my first jobs I spent an entire week sitting in a dark windowless room faxing…yes faxing…media releases to every media outlet in Australia. It was cutting edge technology at the time. (Though still a terrible way to spend a week of your life). Now the only faxes seem to be at the post office.

    I’m working on a book that is set back in the early 90’s and in the present which has me pondering the now and then of technology and how it affects how we dated or were courted then and of course how different it is now.

    Some of the things that made it hard to get in touch with someone you were meeting for dinner or finding a long lost friend included no mobile phones, no e-mails, no google and of course no facebook. If some one moved from say Sydney to San Francisco you needed to know that before you could even hope to find them, via a phonebook from their new town (also a dying medium). You couldn’t just pop their name into a search engine and hope for the best.

    If someone said they’d call you back then you sat by the home phone and waited and waited and waited. You made family members get off the phone so the line was free..it was all very fraught…and of course your family more than likely had one phone between them whether there were ten of two of you. Now some people don’t even have home phones and every kid over the age of ten seems to have a mobile.

    It’s interesting to look at how these changes have affected the dynamics of relationships both then and now. At least for me it is. I wonder about people I lost touch with, friends even, and would that have happened with facebook and mobile phones. Then again these days a clean break is probably much harder to make.

    Now days people get dumped via text which seems dreadful, but really there’s no good way to get dumped. (I wonder if anyone ever got dumped by fax? I hope not.) That didn’t happen in the ’80’s or ’90s.

    This is a pretty rambling post but…here’s a little tune that speaks to the topic of chan