Before the Web, Hearts Grew Silent

As a counter to the author's own romantic example: my wife and I probably would never have gotten together without modern social networking. When my wife and I met, she was living in Oregon and I was living in Chicago. We met while she was in town to interview at the law school I was attending. She was in professional mode and I was a stressed out first year student, and we never would have pursued a relationship in the days before gchat. But instant messaging is a very unique medium. The lack of visual feedback tends to encourage frank conversations, and the "who else is up at this hour?" aspect tends to encourage reaching out to people you wouldn't necessarily call up on the phone. By the time of our "first date" months later, we had met each other exactly twice but already knew a tremendous amount about each other.

I'll bet life was more romantic before spoken language. People weren't busy talking or thinking in anything but emotion and memories of senses. Let's long for those days.

Sometimes I think I was lucky to be one of the last people ever to experience "love in the time of snailmail" and one of the first to experience love at the dawn of IM.

I know exactly what its like to write those "long, heartfelt missives" and check a mailbox like a crack addict and I also know the thousand tiny thrills one got from that new "ICQ" client's happy little "uh-oh!".

Which is better? More "real and heartfelt"? I've got only selection bias to offer. I lost "heartfelt missive" and married "uh-oh!". Modern technology rocks like an old man on his porch.

Road trips with multiple cars were down right dangerous. Cars weren't as reliable back then, and you could never tell if one car had disappeared from a flat or car trouble. Meeting points, pulling over, middle men for pay phone tag. The CB radio did change things -- watch movies from the CB era and you see the rise of information exchange.

Today you can still have a car chase on the I-70 in the middle of Utah and the cell phone won't matter to your plot, no reception, no gas either. Just need to change your setting.

"In my day, we lived and loved with so much more depth of feeling. Not like these kids today with their [x]'s and their [y]'s."

Hmm,

Book plots, movie plots and real-life drama in many ways revolve around missed connections.

TV shows where everyone has a cell phone now have to use the device of turned-off, missing etc phones.

A world of perfect connections would theoretically have no drama but since connections are never perfect, we would never have that. On the other hand, in the technologically connected world, missed connections become tech failures. But someone, the richness of "a passionate glance in a crowded room" seems much greater than "a pic I saw just before hard drive crashed".

"Consider the ending of “Doctor Zhivago,” when a chance sighting of Lara on a city street leads Yuri’s heart to rupture as she disappears before he can reach her. Had the Internet been around during the Bolshevik Revolution, Yuri and Lara never would have lost each other. They would have been Facebook “comrades,” boring each other to death with snapshots of food (“Borscht!”) and ironic observations of proletariat struggle."

I've sadly not watched "Doctor Zhivago" -- but I do know that tweeting your every move while being part of a revolution is a great way to be put against the wall and shot before it is over.

I'm also a bit puzzled about the premise of the article -- while distance relationships may have been made more bearable than before, trying to maintain contact across continents is still a dreary proposition. You might walk around historical sites, tweeting images of what you see -- it's still not anywhere near the same as being able to truly share that experience with someone you care deeply for.

Other than that, good on the author for not letting go of his wife-to-be.

Whenever I watch a movie or TV show more than a decade old, I can't help but think: that would never happen now, they'd be too busy tweeting/facebooking/instagramming it

Like, "Hamsterdam" in "The Wire"...as if a drug free zone could last two minutes before someone uploaded footage to YouTube and Buzzfeed got a hold of it.

Ha. Same deal, except we were using usenet, in the 80s.

I got an email from a sysadmin saying, "Hey, you've got all this mail queued up for her and she left this job a couple of months ago, should I just delete it?"

Didn't marry her, that one didn't have a happy ending. :-/

I was watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles the other day and much of the whole plot would not exist with modern tech.

Also, horror movies have a hard time now as well. For some reason they have to be so far away as to get no reception or in some sort of zone that won't allow it.

I think Under the Dome highlights this a bit as well.

But there are new plot lines and possibilities. At least flip phones have been removed from modern tv and movies, and computers/devices are at least more accurately represented.

Yes! I watched the movie "Bullitt" a few years ago and noticed that half the action wouldn't have happened if the participants had had cell phones.

> "The outside world fell away, and it became just us slowly unlocking each other’s secrets, dreams and opinions, which in those days were not posted on “walls” for anybody to casually scroll through. We felt we were the only two people in the world."

My partner and didn't put our relationship on fb for maybe six months or so... but even if we did, how would that have made it any less meaningful? I like the general 'what if' vibe of this, I'm (just) old enough to have some missed connections, but the superior tone is just a bit comical.

I think what they've forgotten is that the biggest reason things don't come together is the personalities of the people involved, or not even speaking out at all - which will happen regardless of the comms tech available.

Not only is this still a thing, but it's something you help with:

http://www.redcross.org.uk/Get-involved/Volunteer/Migration-...

"When families are separated by war or disaster, our volunteers search for lost loved ones and put them back in contact."

Or, outside the UK:

http://www.redcross.org/what-we-do/international-services/re...

Now it becomes possible to have meaningful transcontinental relationships, with cheap passenger jet flights and instant free pocket to pocket messaging and video calls.

Let us not romanticize the past. Nightly facetime calls are much less drama-inducing than last minute emergency one-way flights.