But yeah, we’ll still have toasters.
...and they still won't work very well!! 🤣🤣🔥🔥🍞🍞
You will be able to buy something that looks like a bicycle but which lets you pretend you're going for a ride while it does all the hard work for you. 😀
Kettables. Really, I don't know how I survived without one. That and chipsmades.
I think the phone and internet thing generally just seems to have changed us all so significantly - without us really noticing. We focus on the trivia - the vacuous influencers etc - but actually we're hugely empowered by it all - we're all now sort of psychically connected to all our friends - even friends we don't actually know - and we take it all for granted. We can contact each other, find each other, find our way around, find out about everything about us (I've spent the morning idly travelling through time the the NLS Spyglass looking at the moment the house I'm buying was built, then back to before the railway arrived, then forward seeing the town grow around it, all the time, easily - just as an idle distraction while I wait for the solicitor to call.
When I was a student in the early 90s every weekend I used to drive with a friend from Birmingham to Leeds - drop him off at his girlfriends place, drive on the Hull, spend the weekend with my girlfriend, drive back to Leeds, pick him up somewhere then back to Brum. Looking back... I can't figure out how I coordinated picking him up again - both gf's houses had phones that were incoming only - but we were both out and about having fun all weekend anyway- yet somehow we knew when and were to meet so I could pick him up - and I can't remember how we communicated that - its must have required planning but I can remember all the fun stuff but nothing about how we made it happen
Bands n gigs - we used to have to scour the ads in the NME/Sounds/Melody Maker for our local venues and hope they'd listed the gig when someone good was playing. Then wait for the day and hope there were tickets left, queue early to be sure! Or even drive/bus/taxi to the venue in advance to buy a ticket and don't lose it for gawd's sake!
Now I get pop-ups on my phone, click it, pay, ticket in an app. It's a bit better ain't it!
(Thankfully, I don't go to gigs where the new fangled arrangement is re-mortgaging the house to be able to afford a ticket!!)
Wot maccruisekeen says.
My current trip would have been very different pre internet. I've used my phone for mapping with loads of info about routes. I've stayed with folk who I only know thru the internet. I've kept in contact with family and friends. I've checked the weather etc etc.
It has made the trip so much easier ( i bicycle toured pre internet) and the communication via the internet has removed much of the loneliness.
I was expecting TJ to be cynical about phones, pleasantly surprised.
Once aged about 15 I cycled 10 miles on a freezing morning to visit a "mate" and go to his house, but rather than give me directions he said he'd meet me at a spot and show me. He didn't show up, so I waited for an hour and then cycled home. Not much of a mate, obvs, but it wouldn't have happened now.
go to his house, but rather than give me directions he said he’d meet me at a spot and show me.
I used to work for a specialist art transport company and travel round the UK delivering and collecting from various artists, collectors and galleries. There was a guy up in a remote part rural Perthshire (I think he was a publisher I took a van load of original manuscripts there) who created a trail of clues along the glen to his house - a yellow bucket, a welly on a fence post and so on, all the way from his house to the A9 then sent me a lengthy fax with instructions on what to do as I encountered each item.
Weirdly back in those days - I could arrive in a town and usually have a good instinct about where its art gallery would be - industrial revolution era towns the art gallery, library and town hall would all be right next to each in the middle of town - places that got flattened in WW2 with a new road layout the art gallery would be in a bit of parkland next the ring road. It was too expensive to buy an A-Z in every town I went to so I'd just follow my hunch first and ask in a filling station if I got it wrong - I managed to guess right surprisingly often 🙂
Are you one of my clients who supplies a shitly lit and out of focus phone image and wants it to be a hero shot in a catalogue and just keeps saying enhance it?
I know this is derailing the thread but I was once supplied a picture of a wooden staircase with a stairgate at the bottom (the client was a carpenter). I used the picture that he supplied in his brochure and he went mental at me for not deleting the stairgate from the picture. He went ballistic when I told him how much it would cost for me to Photoshop it out. He went apoplectic when I suggested he went back to the house, remove the stairgate, and take the picture again.
@hot_fiat
Full Member
Kettables. Really, I don’t know how I survived without one. That and chipsmades.
I've had to wear something very similar to the kettable.
While working at Starbucks I had to occasionally wear a backpack sized thermos flask and give out free samples of very, very black coffee in espresso sized cups near the strand. It was Villiers Street,one of the busiest streets in Europe at the time.
It took a very long time to give Londoners free back coffee as they marched from the tube to wherever they were off to in black suits.
I think the phone and internet thing generally just seems to have changed us all so significantly – without us really noticing.
You say you haven't noticed. Go out without your phone, leave it at home. Report back later. 😁
You're right, of course. We have become a connected world in an astonishingly short space of time. I had my first mobile phone in 1999. The first smartphones that were actually smart rather than a glorified PDA (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone etc) were about ten years later, which broadly correlates with 3G becoming widespread. Meanwhile, home Internet in the 90s was the domain of hobbyists and nerds; today it's so ubiquitous that people don't even ask any more, you're an outlier if you don't have Internet access.
And we have become reliant on it even more quickly. My phone can be a camera, a map, a music player, a reference book, a payment method, a torch, a public transport timetable (and tickets), a restaurant menu, a portable games console, a calendar, an alarm clock, a proof of identity, a book, a calculator... and oh yeah, and I can make phone calls on it too. Elsewhere on the forum just yesterday someone was talking about how they "need" their kids to have a smartphone so they can be contacted / GPS tracked. No you don't. You might want it and indeed I can wholly get behind this, I'd probably be saying the same thing if I had kids, but having the ability to do so at all is a remarkably recent change. A little over 20 years ago we didn't have any of this, today forgetting your phone is a personal disaster.
Imagine that on Tomorrow's World in the 70s.
CAR-T therapy. Gene editing humans. Monoclonal antibody magic bullet therapies (THE 1975 seminal paper if you are interested https://www.nature.com/articles/256495a0 led to the Nobel Prize). I still recall the lock and key explanation of how a drug works with a big key and a polystyrene receptor.
Whilst phones, computers and connectedness have been revolutionary, they have been relatively progressive linear evolution. Some of the biotechnology has been simply magic.
I had the privilege of meeting Judith Hann for some communications training at work. She and her husband run a training company for improving science communication. She was lovely and it was a hilight of my career. And I mean that sincerely.
And there is a flying car now 🙂 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60072194
I probably would have thought eMTBs were amazing and would have wanted one really badly.
Not that fussed now I'm a grumpy middle-aged man though.
and the communication via the internet has removed much of the loneliness.
I think that psychic connection thing is as much about the indirect connection rather than direct communications - through social networks and the like, even the general informality of texts you sort of have a sense of the mood of the people around you
You say you haven’t noticed. Go out without your phone, leave it at home. Report back later. 😁
I'll signal my findings by setting fire to something shall I? 🙂
I think you notice when its not all there - I think we just didnt notice we were taking quite a massive step into the future when we took it.
I think I only noticed the transition on one occasion - being at a music festival sometime in the late 90s/early noughties with a group of friends that had come together from across the country - a few people had phones most didnt - those that did could hardly get a signal or were somewhere too noisy to hear their phone ring. As we'd cross paths from time to time between noodle vans and fairground rides you'd get phone owners asking non phone owners to tell another phone owner if you see them to call them. What? I'm your secretary now?
For that summer socialising changed from like minded people meeting in the same place on the same same evening each week to weird dispersed pub crawls where one phone owner amongst the members of the group you'd managed to find texting 'where are you?' and getting the reply from someone from another grouplette with 'we've just left the Duke'. And gone where? For a short while there seemed to be this fear of missing out amongst the phone owners and an evenings socialising just wouldn't stay put.
Bands n gigs – we used to have to scour the ads in the NME/Sounds/Melody Maker for our local venues and hope they’d listed the gig when someone good was playing. Then wait for the day and hope there were tickets left, queue early to be sure! Or even drive/bus/taxi to the venue in advance to buy a ticket and don’t lose it for gawd’s sake!
Now I get pop-ups on my phone, click it, pay, ticket in an app. It’s a bit better ain’t it!
I used to read about a gig in NME midweek, then pop down to London on the Saturday and buy tickets at the box office of the Astoria or whichever venue... maybe at a ticket sales place.
Touts didn't really bother with indie gigs back then.
Preferred that to having to be online the very second a gig is announced to get tickets.
Preferred that to having to be online the very second a gig is announced to get tickets.
Exactly, as I said - thankfully I don't do those types of gigs 😀
Cars.
Unlike phones which got better the more people had them and the more they could do and thus the more you could get done.
Cars got worse. When one middle class person had one it was great for them, and everyone else just lived in what we'd now aspirationally call "15 minute walkable neighborhoods". Now everyone has one and it's rubbish (and ironically the middle classes now work from home and complain that they need the car because they've moved to a nice old farmhouse in the Cotswold's and need to visit gran who has a nice old farmhouse in the Fens, without a hint or irony that the reason they both live so far from each other is because they told themselves that the car would make it practical).
Exactly, as I said – thankfully I don’t do those types of gigs 😀
I don't go to any, but I'd kind-of assumed it's like that for any gig these days.
😀
I remember thinking that by the time we could make calls with our video watches like Dick Tracy we would have solved all the world’s problems. Lols!
TBH can you remember when 3 came out, it was all about the video phone and it never really took off and the same happened with pen and touch on pda's was way crap, it took something like the iPhone to unite a load of things that were crap with great usability due to the software to actually deliver where we are now.
Blade Runner.
Flying cars, synthetic humans, deep space colonies. Just remember you have to use a public phone booth to make, admittedly a video call, phone call.
Reading some sci-fi books is quite funny too cos they assume things like hoverboards and jetpacks but also haven’t got beyond tape decks and analogue.
You're assuming that ALL tech moves at the same pace, or doesn't have other reasons for being stuck in a particular moment.
In 100 years time, I guess that people will be saying about us that we had sophisticated electronic technology but physical transport that had barely developed since mid 20th Century. Pretty much the reverse of Blade Runner, in fact. And a system of politics, warfare and aggression that would be recognisable to Julius Caesar. We are just monkeys with smart phones.
In 100 years time, I guess that people will be saying about us that we had sophisticated electronic technology but physical transport that had barely developed since mid 20th Century.
I think it was Arthur C Clarke who proposed that an advanced civilisation would either need perfect communication or perfect transport, but once you've got one you don't need the other. We're definitely further down the lines to getting comms sorted than we are transport.
We’re definitely further down the lines to getting comms sorted than we are transport.
Yeah, maybe the need for quick transport is offset by immediate communication and info. But you've just described Blade Runner. 😀
When I was a student in the early 90s every weekend I used to drive with a friend from Birmingham to Leeds – drop him off at his girlfriends place, drive on the Hull, spend the weekend with my girlfriend, drive back to Leeds, pick him up somewhere then back to Brum. Looking back… I can’t figure out how I coordinated picking him up again – both gf’s houses had phones that were incoming only – but we were both out and about having fun all weekend anyway- yet somehow we knew when and were to meet so I could pick him up – and I can’t remember how we communicated that – its must have required planning but I can remember all the fun stuff but nothing about how we made it happen
My first uni halls of residence (1997) had 6 flats, arranged over 3 storeys with a central stairwell, 5 students per flat. This was before mobiles were commonly available - no-one in our block had one. The only way for parents / friends to get in touch was to phone the single payphone in the central stairwell and ask whoever answered it to talk to [name] in flat [number]. The answerer would then need to go to the entry buzzer, buzz up to whatever flat it was and the recipient of the call would then have to run down to have a really not very private conversation that echoed up the whole stairwell.
Somehow, it all just worked.
In 100 years time, I guess that people will be saying about us that we had sophisticated electronic technology but physical transport that had barely developed since mid 20th Century.
I think it was Arthur C Clarke who proposed that an advanced civilisation would either need perfect communication or perfect transport, but once you’ve got one you don’t need the other. We’re definitely further down the lines to getting comms sorted than we are transport.
there was an item on the radio a few days ago pointing out that don't treat 'transport' and 'communication' as the same issue at government level - that they dont come under the same department. So that - prior to lockdown at least - it wouldn't have occurred to government minister that you could address issues of congestion or pollution by investing in Zoom.
