Phones were wired to the wall, or if they were cordless, they were still housebound. I would read the paper while listening to the radio, but I wouldn’t check my email while updating my status while checking the news sites while talking on the phone. That bygone time had rhythm, and it had room for you to do one thing at a time it had different parts mornings included this, and evenings that, and a great many of us had these schedules in common. But televisions, DVD players, the rest: you were never totally committed to what they showed you were always cheating on them, chatting and wandering away, fast-forwarding and rewinding, even when commercials didn’t shatter their continuity. It used to be the case that when you were at a movie, you were 100 per cent there, in the velvety darkness watching lives unfold in flickering light (unless you were making out). The subsidiary pleasures – dressing up, standing in line with strangers and friends, the smell of popcorn, holding hands in the dark – still exist, but more and more often movies are seen on smaller and smaller and more private screens. Going back a little further, movies were seen in movie theatres, and a whole gorgeous ritual went along with seeing them. ![]() It was exciting to get a letter: the paper and handwriting told you something, as well as the words. Some of the mail was important and personal, not just bills. You opened the mail when you came home from work, or when it arrived if you worked from home. A few hours wasn’t such a long time to go between moments of contact with your work, your people or your trivia. Time passed in fairly large units, or at least not in milliseconds and constant updates. A great many people relied on the same sources of news, so when they discussed current events they did it under the overarching sky of the same general reality. You listened to the news when it was broadcast, since there was no other way to hear it. If there were developments you heard about them on the evening news or in the next day’s paper. Those mail and newspaper deliveries punctuated the day like church bells. ![]() Some of us even had a newspaper delivered every morning. News came in three flavours – radio, television, print – and at appointed hours. Letters came once a day, predictably, in the hands of the postal carrier. When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was before most of us were on the internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. Or rather, it began to undergo a metamorphosis that is still not complete, but is profound – and troubling, not least because it is hardly noted. In or around June 1995 human character changed again.
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