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Back To the Social Media Future
theodp writes: Decades before WhatsApp, Gmail, Facebook, and multiplayer Call of Duty, there was TERM-talk, P-Notes, Notesfiles, and Battlestar. Brian Dear goes back to the future, penning A 1980 Teenager's View on Social Media, as written by his 19-year-old UDEL undergrad self, an avid user of PLATO, the 55-year-old granddaddy of today's MOOCs. (His article is a response to "A teenager's view on social media," published last week by a current teenager.) Of old-school texting, Dear notes that you-are-how-you-type: "Every character is displayed in real time as each of us types. So *how* you TERM-talk with folks becomes part of your reputation. Kind of like what your handshake is like. We all know when we shake somebody's hand and they have a firm, confident grip, full of vigor and life, a quick shake and release and you know this person is with it. And then there are those with cold, clammy fish hands that feel like they have no bones, it's all just cushion all the way down. Well in TERM-talk, if you type fast, that's cool."
Being an old fart myself, I immediately recognized my wife's hand when she sent me a Morse message.
Am I cool now? Or is it my wife, I'm not sure.
Incredibly,PLATO had gas-plasma flat-panel bitmapped touch-screen display terminals in 1972, which was still back in the days of paper tape and punch cards!
Perhaps. But remember they can see the characters ... a...s ........ .y...........o............u...... t....y............p..... e....
A pause for reflection before a response is one thing. 3 minutes watching the response slowly how up as they hunt and peck the keys is something else.
(sigh, lameness filter encountered. Trying to add some filler here to convince it the ellipses had a point. Nope that's not enough. I guess I'll remove some dots. There were longer pauses between some of the letters.
Original author of the article here. Sigh. I wrote the damn article in one sitting over about 5 hours on Friday. Yesterday. Because I was sick of seeing everyone and their pet hamster tweeting and facebooking and otherwise mentioning the other piece on Medium, the #1 story on Medium still, about the 19-year-old "actual teenager" and his view of social media in 2015. There was plenty of social media in 1980, and I experienced it, and I was 19 then. So I did a brain dump, in the style of the other Medium article. - @brianstorms (who would sign in here on Slashdot but I don't remember the damn password)