Lately I haven’t had
as much access to the Internet as I usually would, and the whole thing has got
me wondering… how did people possibly survive before social media? I’m talking
way back in the day, when the “horse power” of your vehicle was literal and attached
to your carriage. How did people share what they were doing, stalk what others
were doing, and just generally interact without actually interacting?
Did people hire
painters to spend hours immortalising the salad they just made on canvas, only
to enquire at the end what it would look like with the X-Pro II filter?
Were messengers sent
out in a frantic flurry to inform as many villagers as possible that their
masters were, in fact, getting buff at the local exercise parlour?
Did waiting outside the
royal gates for any kind of monarch to go somewhere so they could be followed
equate to a reply from a celebrity on Twitter?
Maybe back then they
were less about “checking in” and more about checking out their surroundings.
Maybe catch ups were held face to face, not over an instant messaging forum,
and when they shared their lives with each other they never got the response of
“oh yeah, I read that on Facebook”.
That’s not to say I
think social media is a terrible thing. In fact, like many other advancements
since the Ye Olde Days, like sewerage systems and electricity, I think it
serves a brilliant place in society. To me, it’s just one of those things, like
sewerage plants and electricity bills, that can seem overwhelming in large
doses.
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