Perhaps it’s as my friend Martin says, “When you’ve got a hammer, everything seems to be a nail.” I’m currently working on a book on my life with 8-bit computers, so I can’t rule out that I just want to go back to the old days with everything that belonged to them. Anyway…
Have you noticed how since the Internet entered our lives, our communication has been losing intimacy? Once upon an eternity, we used to write letters to each other, taking the time to sort out our thoughts and then put them down in an almost literary form. Where are they now? I positively know some of my friends would actually be bothered by reading longer e-mails these days, with most of the fun being gone by the nagging thought that a response might be expected, and that would require time, the most precious commodity in the online world. Dammit, sometimes I even rather break a message to such people down to two or three mails just to make sure they actually read it and get the information I want them to get out of it.
It’s not a computer thing, it’s an online thing. I’ve had a Commodore 64 for some 22 years, so I remember the old days of computer communication, before everything went online. What we’ve had on the 8-bit computers is noters, but don’t imagine anything like Notepad. Actually, I think these editors should have been named letter-makers because the focus is on allowing you to do what letters were made for – express yourself. You can use up to four fonts at the same time for whatever other kind of emphasis you wish (the number of fonts you can choose from is virtually unlimited – I have to know, having designed a few myself), set it all to the colours that express your mood best, and should you wish so, you can make parts of your text really stand out of the screen with flash effects. And to put icing on the cake, you can add music to your letter, something absolutely cool in our world where music matters so much!
I doubt there has ever been a more efficient and more fun way of offline communication. I doubt it could be marketable in the 21st century.
A screenshot from ThunderBlade’s Ultraflash-Noter 3, my favourite letter-maker. The screenshot falls short of the actual experience, as you can’t see the flashing of some of the words and you can’t hear the music.
Still, even the 8-bit folk switched to e-mail. First because it was new and cool. Then because it was significantly more convenient to type an e-mail and send it with a mouse-click for free than save the message, put the disk into a padded envelope, address it and go to the post office. Today, we’re out of excuses. Those of us who are still active can save the file onto an SD card, go to the PC and send it as an e-mail attachment but we won’t. Either we still find it too costly time-wise (after all you’d have to choose the fonts and the music), or we forgot how to express ourselves.
In any case, it’s sad. We’ve exchanged a deeply intimate form of communication for the superficial world of emoticons, “friends” and “likes”. Quality for quantity and a vague feeling of “not being alone”.
Now pretty pretty pretty please with sugar on top (Monkey Island, anyone?) don’t get me wrong! I embrace the online world and some of the social networks (feel free to follow me on Twitter), and I’m over the Moon because I can stay in daily touch with a lot of my foreign friends. It just bothers me that instead of enhancing our communication, the tweets and shouts on the wall and single-paragraph e-mails became all of it.
