It’s hard to remember a world – only a quarter of a century ago – when most people had no public visibility. Imagine it. A world without social media influencers, TikTok trolls, YouTube channels, and bots. The only way you ever got your name or face in public was if a newspaper published your letter or you got interviewed as a “vox pop” (face in the crowd) on TV or radio. Otherwise, you were invisible.
Those who craved some recognition – hopeless cases like myself – would pen letters to the newspaper, get on to radio phone-ins, and pray that one day a TV camera would find you. But most Boomers in the late 20th century accepted that their lives would be lived in a state of anonymity – except for friends and family. Then after sixty years – 99% of us would be forgotten forever. The same applied to their parents and all previous generations in history.
Lower expectations in life before social media
This was a world where expectations were a lot lower than today. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the average person aspired to a steady job, marriage, and a house. There was no ambition to become a global sensation. The irony now is that digital and social media have raised expectations to stratospheric levels, while diminishing real-world opportunities.
Look at this 1977 newspaper article below about sixth grade school children in the United States and their hopes for the future. The observation that leaped out to me was: “sixth graders are usually shy…so wanting to be famous might seem odd…”. Well, a generation later, as we’ll see below, it is the norm.
The only people whose names were universally recognised in the pre-digital era were movie stars, pop stars, politicians, and high-profile criminals – murderers and serial killers. You might argue there’s an overlap between those categories but the law of defamation prevents me commenting further. For most of us, we watched passively on TV – or listened on the radio – or read in the newspaper – about famous people and their lives. Nobody seriously imagined they could become one of those celebrities.
1990s chat rooms
The intrusion of the internet began to change all this to the point today where young people need to validate their existence through ‘likes’ and ‘follows’. It began in the 1990s with internet chat rooms. So, I would invite people back after a night of clubbing and we would sit around a screen attached to a separate keyboard, CPU, and modem. You most likely bought your hardware from Dell or Gateway.
To make chat room magic happen, I had a CompuServe account which offered a selection of message forums on all kinds of topics managed by very bossy administrators who set the rules. You reached out to other people who, normally, kept their identity secret by using a ‘handle’. One of the first conversations I had was with a very odd guy in Alabama called ‘Razorkill’. The text you typed appeared on screen in real time – which was amazing – and then the response came back rapidly, letter by letter. There was no video – or even still images – in these early days.
In 1998, The Guardian newspaper looked at chat rooms and found upsides and downsides. For the socially awkward, it seemed that online chat was a godsend. The internet was “a place where acceptance rather than rejection is the norm”. We forget this now, in our world of online bullying, trolling, and criminality, that the internet began with a huge amount of hope. But as we’ll see below, the dangers emerged early.
Chat rooms came to be seen as confessional booths where total confidentiality applied among the group. On the surface, this was a good thing. People could use the chat room for therapy and seek advice. The kind of habitual malice and cruel mockery that is all over the comments sections of social media channels today was absent at the start. It was all about mutual respect and what is sometimes termed, the Chatham House Rule. Nothing said in the chat room was to be divulged outside.
However, in 1998, as mentioned in The Guardian article, a game developer admitted in a chat room to having murdered his five-year-old daughter by setting the family home on fire. Some members of the chat room were sufficiently shocked to contact the police. They were then condemned by others in the chat room for undermining the status of the chat room as a sanctuary, even for murderers.
My own experience in an LGBT chat room was very instructive in the late 1990s. Having lived through the appalling HIV/AIDS pandemic, I argued that as a ‘community’ we had an obligation to protect each other. And that meant not having unprotected “bareback” sex if you were HIV positive, even if the other person hadn’t asked about your HIV status. To knowingly infect somebody with a virus that was then a death sentence, simply for a few minutes of pleasure, was beyond irresponsible – I argued.
Well, that was my first experience of being mugged verbally online. Almost the entire chat room, including the moderator, came down on me like a tonne of bricks. Did I want HIV positive people to wear leper bells? Why should they disclose their status? And so it went on. The law eventually sided with me and reckless transmission is a criminal offence.
This was an instructive episode that left me a bit wounded at the time. To have total strangers – in real time – descend on you was a whole new experience. Suddenly, from your desk at home, you were sucked into a row with a large number of people. It seemed incredibly threatening.
I’m going to split this post in two – so look out for the next one when I discuss how Britain nearly beat Facebook, the confusion of Bebo and MySpace, and how Facebook and Twitter emerged triumphant – before everything went horribly wrong.
