OK, for those of you locked in the sights of the Twitter generation, you probably haven't given much consideration as to how your parents or others who were either teenagers or in their early 20's connected 30 or 40 years ago because what could they possibly have to communicate that was of any interest?
For starters, if they didn't connect, most of you in the"need to know it before it happens" generation wouldn't be here. It may come as a shock to you that we somehow managed to communicate without smart phones, texting, emails, twitter, you tube, google etc. etc. Yeah, it was pretty slow and lame compared to the insta-communications of today, but you know what? That's what made you cool-knowing what was going on because you were "connected." When we heard about something interesting, we didn't feel a need to yell it out to the world. Indeed, we usually felt a need to only share it with a few others. And no one ever gave a flying crap what anyone else other than their close friends and maybe family were doing at any given moment in time. And even then, no one much cared. In the 60's, if you hung out at the A&W, you could pretty much stay in the loop.
How did we connect? Well-it all depended more on who you knew, and not so much on what you knew. For example, a lot of people didn't know about the greatest get-together of the 60's (maybe ever) called "Woodstock" until days or weeks after it happened. You may find that hard to believe since today, almost everyone on the planet knows everything about every potential "happening" thing within seconds of it being announced.
I found out about Woodstock because I happened to be in Montreal at the time and someone at a party we were at, had been at the local Playboy club (remember them?-now if you were able to get into a PB club, you were really connected) and had overheard a musician talking about Jimi Hendrix playing in some place called Woodstock NY, the following week. Hendrix was not mainstream back then but one of my friends who was plugged into music told us that he was great. Good enough for us-US roadtrip- Hell yeah!! We were off.
The sad story is we never made it because the VW van (how classic was that?) we were driving just had no cajones left. So after it broke down, we spent the weekend trying to drink all the COLT 45 we could find in Albany NY where it turns out one of the guys in the van met a lovely lady and last contact I had, still lives there after he married her. Although he was a Canadian, he still had to register but luckily, his draft lottery number was never called.
Everyone who was "connected" just seemed to know when there would be a great party, a bitchin street race, a cool protest, a much needed brawl (no weapons involved back then), a sporting event not to be missed, an awesome concert etc etc.
The point is, we didn't need or want something like a social media website to connect us to these kinds of events back then because we had our own network and methods for finding out. If you didn't know what was going on, that's because you weren't connected either because you didn't want to be or didn't deserve to be. Today everyone "thinks" they are connected, but those of us who lived in the 60s and 70s had to use something more than a gadget to connect and if you don't understand what I mean, I feel sorry for you.
Reality check time. Do you really care what anyone else is doing right now-other than your family and Obama? (and CNN pretty much has the latter covered 24x7.)
NOTE: Notwithstanding the above, I have several gadgets which I use to "connect" now, and I use Twitter, FB, Linked-In and of course blog. However, I still look back on the ability to make connections the "old school way" as understanding how connections are really made.
