And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
I was watching News Radio just now, which for those of you who might not remember was a sitcom in the mid-to-late 90s. It’s not a great show, but it has a mostly great cast and some good moments. Also I got it for cheap.
The episodes I watched tonight originally aired in April of 1996. Given that time frame, there were two lines in those two episodes that I found interesting to consider from our current perspective. The first was (roughly), “You can’t take something off of the internet; it’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.”
This is a very well-put and not-obvious truth. We, now, know this fact very well, but at that time I don’t think it was very widely understood. To see so prescient an idea spoken about with such eloquence, and on a mid-ranked sitcom, no less!
The second comment was not as prescient, but it still makes us think about how far we’ve come in our thinking about computers. Someone is given advice: “You don’t want to delete your file until you’re sure you have a hard copy.” When was the last time you deleted a file from your computer because you had it on hard copy? We delete files we don’t need any more, but the ones we do need, we keep them on the computer.
Back then, the computer was a tool for creating pieces of paper with writing on them. These pieces of paper were the artifact that contained the idea or the message. Today, the artifact is the file on the computer, and we only print to paper if we need to. We might use the paper to read on and mark up, or to bring with us if we need the information where a computer isn’t handy, or to hand out. In fact, we use the paper as a tool just like we used to use the computer as a tool.
Of course this isn’t true with all computer files. We still use software to create posters or magazines or books, and in that case we still think of the finished product as the thing and the file as the tool, but you don’t know how long that will last. It wasn’t long ago that physical photographs were the medium of transfer, but with today’s memory sticks and portable digital screens, that’s pretty much over already.
Both of the lines that I so liked were spoken by the character Joe Garrelli, played by Joe Rogan, longtime UFC fight commentator and host of the hit show, Fear Factor. So, you never know where it’s gonna come from.
P.S.: While trying to remind myself what the internet was like in 1996, I came across this page, which is wonderful and worth a read:
https://www.msu.edu/~karjalae/internet96.htm