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penpals and porn* :::
By warriorgrrl | December 13, 2007
I might be showing my age here but I’d like to take a moment to appreciate just how amazing the everyday bits of technology are that we all take for granted. As I write this I am sitting on a train somewhere between Leeds (where I’ve been filming today) and London (where I plan to sleep long and soundly later), simultaneously having a conversation with a friend in Surrey on MSN and an email chat with another friend in India.
People complain about how much time kids spend online these days but I don’t think the situation’s changed all that much, we just have different technology for communication now. When I was a pre-internet teen I spent hours on the phone to my friends in the evenings after school; it was amazing how much we could find to talk about even a few short hours after we’d last seen each other. Another craze was writing letters - not to penpals (though I did this too, devotedly), but to the same schoolfriends I hung out with all day and chatted to at night on the phone. And I’m talking letters rather than notes - literally pages and pages of closely scribbled words. There was even a bit of rivalry in how long the letters were; if Tessa wrote me a four page letter, for example, I would write back a six page one, and so on. When you consider the fact that all we ever did was get up, go to school, go home, do homework, watch television and go to bed I can’t for the life of me imagine what we ever wrote about in those reams of paper.
I remember getting my first email address in 1997. It was a Hotmail account, naturally, and I could only pick up my emails in the school library or the IT room, where the scary Mr W prowled, determined to catch someone looking at all the porn (that’s all he thought was on there, I think). I mostly emailed the very same schoolfriends I wrote to and telephoned, though they didn’t check their accounts very often so I had to tell them I’d emailed them and get them to go and read the message. How things have advanced.
Please, if anyone has any of my letters from school I’d kill to see them. Of course there’s the old days versus modern times argument that an MSN conversation is more throwaway - one click and then it’s gone - but however nostalgic reading those old letters would be I can safely assume the vast majority of the content was absolute rubbish. I only have to look at my diaries from the same time for proof of that.
I’m still curious though…
* a vastly misleading post title, yes