Everything Is New Once
You ever heard of Google? Of course you have! Everyone has, and no one would really ask that question today. Google is such a mainstream concept that it has become a verb, as in, "Why don't you Google that?"But there was a time—not so long ago in the big picture—when it wasn't like that. I can actually remember finding Google on my own years ago, before anyone else I knew had ever heard of it. Back in the earlier days of the 'net, the search engine you used was largely a thing of personal preference—or a matter of what search engines you knew about. Alta Vista was the one I used to use the most, but, unlike today where virtually everyone uses Google, everyone seemed to use something different. And then one day, I found this one that was brand new to me called, "Google," and I remember thinking, "Wow, this one is really great! I think I might use this search engine."
Not too long after that, I got an email from some guy who wrote, "I found your site through Google, the greatest search engine in the world." I remember thinking, "Wow, that's the same one I found! I can't believe someone else knows about this, and knows about its virtues!"
It's hard to believe, but there was a time when Google was new. New to me, new to you, new to everyone.
Similarly, I remember a particularly ahead-of-the-curve tech guy telling me, as a web designer, "There's this new thing gaining steam called a blog. It stands for weB-LOG. You might want to look into it to start incorporating it on your sites."
Hard to believe, but there was a time when "blog" was new.
And I remember when I started noticing a trend. "I keep seeing videos on that same site. YOUR Tube or something." I actually said that out loud, calling it by the wrong name. Obviously, I was talking about the thing that we all know now as YouTube. And YouTube is as mainstream as you can get.
It also happened to me with MySpace, with Facebook... everything is new once.
So far, all I've talked about is Internet-related stuff from the last decade or so. But we can apply this same concept to life in general: One of the great things about aging, I think, is that the older you are, the more stuff you've seen come into existence. I think that's pretty cool. I remember, for example, when the coolest frieken' thing was to have a new walkman. "Holy crap, you got a walkman!" Of course, that seems hard to believe, because walkmen are now long obsolete. But, there was a time when they were new and they were the greatest thing in the world.
Now, if you're under the age of 36 or something, you might not be able to appreciate that. Younger folks may even chuckle in mockery, thinking I seem quaint and out of touch and old fashioned. But I DON'T CARE, because I am in a select group of other cool people THAT WERE THERE. Those people know. They lived it, like I did. They know that as weird as it seems, the thrill was real. It was amazing. Stereo sound, playing cassettes of your favorite albums, in your own "personal" stereo system. Nothing like that had ever existed and we loved it, as you would have if you were there. But if you weren't, you missed out. (For more information, click here.)
Everything is new once.
posted by Steve @ 9:43 PM
2 Comments:
Ah yes, the Walkman. I had several. I even had a cheapass generic one that didn't have a rewind or fast forward button, you just had to patiently continue listening and then flip the tape over. Remember when albums had sides? An "A" side and a "B" side? One side was always better. Music doesn't have sides any more. Do you remember those turntables that had a tall spindle and you could stack 45s (with those yellow plastic dingies in the middle) and listen to a bunch of one-side-of-the-record's in a row?
My grandmother (who died a year ago) was born in 1912. It was amazing to talk to her about all the technology she saw spring up around her during her lifetime. People were delivering ice in horse drawn buggies when she was young and she had a microwave and CDs to play on her Bose Wave sound system when she was old. But you're right, things have changed a lot even in our time. In particular, I really miss the telephones with curly, kinked-up cords and rotary dials. *Sigh*
(Btw, I used to use Alta Vista, too.)
Of course, just like everything else, this is all a matter of perspective. Some things were never new, they've always been around. Like trees. Trees have been around before you, your parents, your town, in fact, before humanity itsef. There was no point when mankind as a whole has said, "Oh, look, a huge-ass hard brown plant growing out of the ground, that's a new one....". Sure, when you're an infant, and you go outside for the first time and see a tree, it's new to you. And sure there are individual people that maybe never saw a tree, like an eskimo, or people living in the middle of a desert, and if they ever visited any other place on earth and saw a tree it'd be big time new to them. But it wouldn't be 'new', and even the dimmest of eskimos probably wouldn't assume that the first tree he saw was in fact the first and only one in existence, and that he found something that was truly new. So it really is a matter of perspective. Why did I bother to bring this all up?
Damned if I know.
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