The 1980s House • 17 June 2008 • The SnowBlog

The 1980s House

          
Before the Internet

Poor Em; she's having to live like folk did back in the Eighties, or maybe the early Nineties. No home internet connection. We've talked on the phone a few times and it's absolutely extraordinary how often some conversational topic gets derailed because there can be no checking, or looking up or sharing or keeping up with things if there's no internet. I mean there could be, but it would hard work. For instance, I bet teletext still carries perfectly good weather-on-demand pages - no tedious waiting for the next major news bulletin - just some tedious waiting around for lots of ugly squares to assemble themselves on your TV screen. Plus I'm sure we could hook up a fax to exchange book covers and other images if there's not enough time to let the postman do it. And, I imagine 35-volume encyclopedia sets have really come down in price for anyone who doesn't have access to Wikipedia and isn't fussed about anything that happened recently. 

But in some ways it's a return to a simpler time. A simpler time when half our long-distance interactions with others and the world at large were either difficult, impossible or undreamt of. Fingers crossed that Em can hold out until the right wires get hooked up. (In the meantime, you take your life in your hands if you go round there with a web-capable mobile phone about your person, I'll tell you.)  
Rob