Ellard

Did you know there was once a time when there was no Internet?

I’ll get you a chair, you’ll feel all right in a moment… but truthfully there was such a time and not long ago. No email and you couldn’t Google for things. You looked them up in books.

I was reminded this week when I decided to get my records manufactured in New Zealand by King Manufacturing. There is a web site but it’s owned by a fan. King has no email. You have to fax. What you do is you type out your email on a piece of paper, and then you put the paper into a thing that looks like a printer. Then you type in the phone number for who you want to fax. The machine slowly pulls the paper in and it makes a copy over on another machine where you are faxing. But you still keep your piece of paper. There’s two pieces of paper afterwards. It’s very mysterious.

Mr. King very kindly rang me on a telephone after he got my fax, because he was worried about my records. He doesn’t often get recordings of people running pianos through digital destruction and was concerned that when he cut it it might overload. Also he wondered if he would have time to cut my records as they have to be done one at a time, taking as long the recording lasts! Now I had previously read about this in books and so didn’t say something silly like why don’t you burn several at once but I said that we had a bit less than two months and so he probably would have time.

So then I photocopied the label art and packaged up the masters to go into the mail. That’s like email but instead of right away it takes a week to get where you are sending it, and it costs $50 if you send it International Priority.

Now I am old and so I can remember that this was once how we did everything. But today I was playing lots of old television to my charges at KUNST KAMP and had to explain that in the very early 90′s we had television instead of the Internet, and it only went one way. So when you watched The Home Shopping Network, the line that said RING NOW meant that you would pick up the telephone and dial a number that was on the screen. There would be a person at the other end, and they would take the order.

(Not too many students worried about it because they sit in the lectures with their laptops open, probably viewing their myspace pages. We didn’t have myspace back then either. There’s good and bad in the new ways.)

I say old television… by that I mean 1993. Fifteen years ago seems a little less quaint than the 80′s probably because bad rap music hasn’t changed at all, nor has reality TV, informercials or FOX NEWS gold bar lettering. Culture has slowed in the last decade or so.

Dramatically so in one case – I showed them the 1970′s magazine Radical Software, which touted a ‘Videosphere’ in which all ‘Videographers’ would combine their voices as an alternative to the Mainstream Media. 38 years later, with slight changes to the terminology, those voices prattle away in the Blogosphere, which has gained nothing in the interim except complete ignorance of the past. Next time somebody tells you that web2.0 is a fresh idea – remind them of how far film progressed in 38 years.