Wisdom and Information

"When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web ... Now even my cat has its own page." Bill Clinton in October 1996.

The 1990’s was arguably the decade in which communication technology grew by leaps and bounds, spreading into all corners of the world. At the beginning of the decade, I worked in a small help desk company called Computer Hand Holding. It was sort of a computer lab, hiring geeks involved in both hardware and software. I was the only woman my boss could find to hold her own in this environment. I could take phone calls, answer the easy questions, passing the harder ones on to my colleagues. And I did have a few women melting down on the other end of the line, happy to talk to me.

Our boss encouraged us to get on Compuserve, an on-line provider that allowed people to sign in to their servers (located in Ohio) via a modem, and leave messages or participate in forums. “I am about to become a ‘lurker,’” I write in August 1992. I didn’t do much of that, as there were few forums on literature and I wasn’t much for gaming. A woman in my writer’s group had been given a subscription to the Well as a present. The Well hosted conferences on writing as well as many other topics, but these things were expensive at the time. I also insisted to myself that I was more interested in wisdom than the information computers could provide.

I did love the email that came with Compuserve, private conversations with friends and relatives who were far away. By the next year, I had an IBM computer with a modem in my home for the purpose. On Compuserve, you paid for the time used. When AOL showed up in the mid-1990’s, people shifted over because AOL used monthly rates. About this time I left the country for a year. When I got back, I worked in a big architectural company which was Mac-based. I bought a small portable Mac computer and got an email address from my Internet Service Provider. Service was still too slow to send photographs easily. When free email service came out, from Microsoft, I was quick to get a hotmail address, which I still use.

People had used answering machines for quite a while by this time, to take phone messages when they weren’t at home to answer their phone. I waited until AT&T added centralized messaging. How wonderful it was to come home, pick up the phone and hear the tones which indicated someone had left a message! Sometimes I would play and replay a message, just to hear the person’s voice. You could pick up your messages from a pay phone as well, which I sometimes was impatient enough to do. The concept of store and forward, for both voice mail and email was new and helpful when people were so active and running around.

Mobile phones really got going in the 1990’s also, using second generation networks with digital technology. Not being a freelance worker, or one who traveled to different sites, I didn’t get a mobile phone until much later. Working in administration, however, I had a drawer full of non-working ones at the office! They were heavy and clunky, but it was a status symbol. All the principals at the firm had to have one. I recall when the president of the company came to me in 1996 and explained that his phone was fine, but he wanted to replace it with a tiny “clamshell” phone, the Motorola StarTAC. He demonstrated how big it was and how he would put it in his pocket! He wanted to be the first to have one.

Working for a big international firm, we sent a great many documents back and forth. At this time I developed my theory that people always trusted the next to the last technology the most. We were all using email, but didn’t trust it as much as the fax machine! People would follow up an email with a phone call to see whether one had gotten the item, and often fax it as well! A fax could also provide a signature that an email could not.

Though the World Wide Web got going in the 1990’s, sophisticated searching, blogging, sending photographs, video conferencing and streaming were all to come. They arrived as transmission rates increased and storage capacities grew. Websites such as MSN and Yahoo for news, Amazon and Ebay for purchasing things, and Google for searching began in the 1990’s, but they came into their own in the following decades.

I feel lucky to have experienced this growth, while at the same time remembering what it was once like to wish that you knew more about something contemporary, to laboriously look up articles about it in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and then hunt down the referenced magazines in some cardboard box in the dusty library stacks! At the time, the idea of Google or Wikipedia would have sounded like Wonderland to me. It is still up to me to process information into wisdom, but perhaps a little more information helps!