NOSTALGIA: The age of innocence before smartphones became endemic

Remember when people actually used landlines and pay phones, scrambling for 20ps to communicate with a crush or a friend you wanted to meet in town, or waiting on a call by an aged rotary phone in the hallway?

An age of innocence, when people met face-to-face for conversation in real time in public places that was arranged via a quick landline call and then you went away and you lived freely until the next interaction, finishing your homework and never imagining the kind of hyper social media smartphone hell of connectivity that now keeps us in a frenetic loop of perpetual and largely inane communication with people, at least 60% of whom, you barely see from one Christmas to the next and in reality can barely stand (but you do somehow know about their recent holiday to the Maldives and that avocado on sourdough brunch they had last Saturday at an upmarket eaterie).

In that bygone age before the advent of the terrible electronic tracking device and artificial limb that became the mobile phone, people enjoyed a kind of solitude with their thoughts, a freedom from the insane 24/7 global interconnectivity we are now so inured to.

Back then, before mobiles, which seemed to drop from the heavens in the late 90s, followed in the late 2000s by the smartphone, people were able to travel significant distances in order to make dramatic exclamations such as: ‘Miriam is dead!’ without your audience having been previously informed of every scintilla of breaking news via some bloody form of mobile device.

Reader, do you remember your first brick-sized mobile by Motorola or Nokia, an awkward contraption with huge buttons? The agonies and wonder of learning how to text? And realising you were suddenly constantly accessible, constantly traceable and constantly able to transcend boring interludes on the bus by regurgitating the who-snogged-who cider-soaked dramas of Saturday nights while yammering down your mobile on the bus?

Then Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp and the infinite stream of mobile calls, snap chats, social media updates and posts that mean every waking minute of our lives is now under constant, unflagging surveillance. George Orwell’s Big Brother now seems benign.