Growing up in the 1970's, technology and the dusty box of photos.

Mass Humanity in Today's Wired World

The plight of the generation who grew up in the 1970's has often been discussed, deciphered and sometimes degraded. We are the generation who grew up when it was easy to get a job after college, when a university degree meant something, whose music was Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd and Yes. Who had free love when it wasn't threatened by AIDS. Who could still survive a late night booze up at the local pub and may I say to my shame, still drive home. Who had all the things their parents were denied because rationing from the war had only just ended. Whose car was the mini, the Ford Anglia, Hillman imp and yes the last version of the glorious Hillman Hunter. Who could go to concerts and see Yes, Mott the Hoople and Genesis without needing to take out a mortgage. Who could afford to take out a mortgage knowing one day it would be paid off. Who banked at banks that behaved themselves with their money. Who didn't need to stand in the rain to take money out of a hole in the wall. When stamps were still something to be put on an envelope with a lick and not securitised. I could go on but I think the point is made. We had it easy, we didn't suffer the slings and arrows of the war generation, nor the hippy generation that crawled out from behind the sofa to cause the revolution. No, we sat back, waited for the fuss to be over and then reaped the rewards.

We could relate to the 80's. Not much different from the 70's except for a rather inappropriate hairstyle called a mullet. The row over the miners that closed most of the pits, was a bit upsetting but we were OK because we already had good jobs, could sit back and watch in our conceit. Our music still held sway, we had given birth to the punk scene, many of the 70's groups were still going though a little greyer. Eric and Ernie were still dominating Christmas air waves and many of our shows including Dr Who and Top of the Pops still held sway. None of us were aware of the rotten heart of the celebrity world where young children were being molested. Its a KnockOut was still a damn good show and Jimmy Saville a man to look up to. There were rumours of a new world coming. Our familiar slide rule and electric calculator were being usurped by a machine called  a computer, there was the first mobile phone the size of a brick. But we could ignore the fuss and carry on living as if it were still the 70's. It was, wasn't it.....really?

The 90's dawned and if we had kept our ears to the ground we would have heard the rumblings of a new world. A man named Bill Clinton was investing millions in something called the internet, there was something called windows 95 that was supposed to be big, money spued out of a bank wall at all hours if you had the right combination code. Some clever dick came up with an expression that technology quadrupled every two years or some such nonsense.... My father died.... But then we were saved, our focus became Y2K when everything was supposed to freeze up due to the lack of two numbers. Freeze all other development, concentrate on the big one. Save the world. Four years we spent on this project and we saved the world, the year 2000 came and went without so much as a whimper, Someone said a train got stuck in a tunnel because it thought 2000 should be a leap year, but we got through it and we congratulated ourselves. But behind our backs something was going on, the floodgates were about to open and technology was about accelerate like never before. All that pent up, running in circles from Y2K had created a monster that was unleashed, digital technology came of age, the 21st century was indeed a new world, a mad scramble took hold, the race was to the swift. And we from the 70's were not ready.

So where does that leave us. Well the new century started and we all survived Y2K. There was the usual soul searching as to whether it had all been necessary, but then the fact that we had fixed everything meant that it inevitably went through without any problems. The unforeseen consequence was that four of five years pent up demand for innovation that had been stalled by Y2K, literally exploded. Banks ramped up their systems, phone companies upgraded their networks and a new 21^st technology known as the ‘app’ entered the lexicon. Information was at your fingertips 24/7, your location mattered little and when the internet’s technology combined with GPS location technology the result was simply stunning as seen with Google maps or Facebook check-in. The phone has now simply become an ‘app’ on a mini hand-held computer. To call the iphone an iphone in some ways may be an insult. The phone feature is just an ‘app’.

So what of the children of this technological evolution? We are all acutely aware of the teenager walking down the road and whenever they stop, at a shop, at a bus stop or simply on a park bench, the phone is taken out and checked for whatever service or services are available. Most phones can now be linked to a laptop at home and a lot of the features can be linked. The children of the 21^st century are truly hot wired to the internet and all that entails. Using my daughter as an example, she evolved with these features as she grew up. Facebook is the classic example where friends were added as they joined the social network, videos were uploaded to youtube, the de facto leader, photos were uploaded to flickr, another leader. Or it could all simply be placed on facebook There was no longer any need to store this stuff in boxes in the attic or bedroom. Letters became texts or emails, articles became online newspapers, books became ebooks although there is still some doubt as to the demise of the physical book. I met some girls once at a car boot sale and I was selling some second hand CD’s and asked if they were interested. We don’t buy CD’s any more! They just watch on youtube or their cloud files. Pity the poor CD, a revolutionary wonderful device that looks like a dying breed after a mere 25 years of existence. Even the USB that may yet be reprieved, is being largely subverted by cloud technology.

But let us return to my central theme and of social network technology which is at the centre of this whirlwind. My daughter, as I mentioned, keeps all the friends she has made on facebook, she keeps all her photos on flickr, receives all her bank statements by email and everything is stored somewhere on the internet. Unintentionally she has provided herself with a massive library of herself, her friends, her interests and her life. This will continue to build over the next 40 or 50 years to a massive library online that defines her life. Nowhere in man’s history has this previously been possible on such a vast scale. Oh sure we have Samuel Pepys diary, but this is one man and few others were as prolific in the minutiae of their daily lives. Many souls simply lived and died and their lives are now represented by some old photographs that are unlabeled resting in some antique shop. My Aunt Bessie is a good example where I have boxes of hopelessly unidentifiable photos. I have collected together what documentation and photographs that can be identified with any degree of certainty and placed in some meaningful order Bessie Field Website. But compared to what could have been and to what my daughter will have, it is a paltry offering. My intention is to put the rest on flickr and invite people to identify the locations so that maybe bring some meaning can be made of them. It will be a labour of love and one small representation of the untold millions who have lived and died. To see my progress please visit Bessie Field Photos.

But what of the us. The generations who, to a large extent, are still living yet have a large chunk of their history in diaries, photo albums and VHS tapes not yet lost. Whose friends are phone numbers and addresses in an address book and what’s more to the point have lost contact with 90% of the people they ever knew. It’s obviously too late for the ‘dead people’ and truth be told the generation from the 1950’s in general shy away from all things technological. I am not defining everyone but in general the generation before the decade of the 1970’s (and I refer to the ten teenage years) are less than enamoured with technology and happy to live out their lives without it. Whereas the the generation from the 1980’s were aware of what was afoot and have generally got up to speed more or less intact. No, it is the group from the 1970’s who most want to be technologically wired and are faced with a bigger mass upload of their lives than anyone else. The teenagers from the 1960’s I have identified as being the one where the jury is still out. They were the hippie generation, free love, free everything and where the young rebelled from the old. I can only go by what I see and in general my older sister and her ilk want little or nothing to do with computers outside work hours and what has to be done. ‘I still prefer to go to the bank in person’. Prefer, not insist, simply prefer.

It took me about three years to upload and digitise all my photos, 2005 to 2007 and I am still working through full annotation of place and people etc. It’s a long job that will last many more years. How laborious compared to the photos I take today that are uploaded fully annotated and complete. I don’t think my CD collection will ever be fully uploaded. I have an amazon cloud library and it is building but the back catalogue is a mere 250 songs until I buy more space. But it is also an ongoing project. I have few videos in comparison so I have finished those already. Yet I pity the fans of super 8 who must to this day be working through boxes of old reels or VHS tapes if indeed they even care. Books are my next challenge and hinges on the purchase of a ebook reader next year. If there is a ‘to be updated’ part of this diatribe then this subject is it.

Which brings me to social media. I have all my current friends as part of this network but I can never hope to have many from my past prior to the advent of facebook. When I think of all the people I knew at school, most of who I can’t remember their names and the ones I can, the girls names will have changed. I have used facebook since 2005 and have about 60 contacts, paltry compared to the 500 plus of my daughter. Why do I care, I don’t but its like a dictionary, you have one but you don’t necessarily look up every word. And yet when you want to find a word you would hate it if it wasn't there. As a library, as a dictionary, as a research tool later in life I think we are only just scratching the surface with what social media can do. But for me it has little to do with chatting with friends and much more a warehouse diary of my life.

In conclusion, I will continue on with the completion of this project to the best of my ability. I will complete my photos file. I will add to facebook any friend I find. I will continue with blogs and document as much as possible the interesting things of my life. I will become as 21st century as I possibly can. This is a scary world and I am sure many feel like bewildered Victorians as the railways changed communication from the horse and cart speed of life to something akin to frighteningly fast. We live in another fast new world, I have embraced it but I still find it daunting as I open yet another box of dusty papers.