Those were the days

Ardent fans of the Diaries would remember this post, now what did kids do before facebook?

1952: Boy notices girl at annual Interschools Athletics Meeting, three weeks later after much research he learns her name and that she lives in Rondebosch. By looking through the phone book he sends a ‘from your secret admirer’ letter to every Johnson living in Rondebosch. He pines for her during the next six months and if a bizarre set of coincidences all occur the chance exists that he will actually talk to her at the 1953 annual Interschools Athletics Meet and they could indeed ‘hook up’ (although that term is not to come into existence till 1974). If this does indeed happen, Postman Pat will be a fit young man on his bike.

1962: Boy notices girl at the movies on a Saturday night. Through a mutual friend he establishes her name and calls her up blindly and invites her as his date to the Spring Ball at Kelvin Grove. The practice of calling up a girl at her parents’ house is still pretty much taboo in these days and she gives him savage bat after he plies her with two glasses of wine during the evening and tries to hold her hand.

1972: Boy notices girl at Clifton Lifesavers beach party. Through a social network spanning four prominent Cape Town High Schools and the envy of spiders the world over, he establishes that she will indeed be at the next month’s Llandudno Lifesavers beach party. Through a twisted system of broken telephone she knows that he is either totally oblivious to her, mildly interested or wants to get in under her dress(girls don’t often wear pants yet). True to form they spot each other, and end up carefully ignoring in a game of ‘hard to get’.

1982: Boy notices girl at Goodwood Ice rink, in between all the fleeting bodies under the ultra-violet light. After brief investigation he finds out that she’s from the cool crowd at Springfield and her father is a GP. He considers getting hold of her through her dad’s pager (all the rage amongst the medical fraternity at the time), but can’t think of a surefire way to bypass the doc. He manages to meet her at the Dutch Tent at the Community Chest Carnival in Maynardville (well everybody who’s anybody is there). Over the next three months they have late night chats using the CB radios in their parents’ cars. The sessions stopped abruptly not due to them getting caught by parents, but because by now the whole school knew that there was a saucy chat on public channel 8 every night.

1992: Boy notices girl during Benson and Hedges Night cricket at Newlands. He ends up scoring her under the chalets next to Castle Corner. He gives her an almost empty Telkom phonecard with the number of the tickie box at his boarding house written on with an Artliner. The next week she leaves a message with the standard six manning the booth, and he spends half of his spare time during the next 6 months attached to the phone with her. This seriously hacks off Mrs Bryant, who can never get hold of her little Timmy. He looks into getting this new thing from Game called a Beepa, it’s the ‘intouch keeper’ but the initial cost is R300, which is a lot of pocket money back then so it goes onto the Christmas wishlist.

1997: Boy notices girl at the Bishops social. He quotes some tacky pick-up line from Beverly Hills 90210, she falls for it and ends up in his study upstairs. He waits a week and then emails her at her Herschel address which he works out from her surname. A seriously sordid chain of communication ensues which includes ASCII images of couples doing stuff, but goes unnoticed by the schools’ respective computer staff. They end up going to each other’s matric dances, invited of course, by email.

2002: Boy notices girl at Ratanga Junction under 18 party. Within five minutes they’re getting hot and heavy in the alley past The Cobra. At the end of the night they exchange cellphone numbers. Portions of a Danielle Steele novel are compressed into 160 characters, twenty times a day (in the days before a 500 sms bundle this was considered seriously high traffic). Later on, he tries to get her into IRC, but she reckons the school computer room is only for nerds. He nods and considers uninstalling Quake and Warcraft II from his PC at home.

2007: Boy notices girl at Cavendish Square Ster-Kinekor on a Saturday night and even manages to talk to her and get her name. The next morning he searches for her on facebook, and decides of the 24 Tracy Smarts she’s the one in the South Africa network with a pony as a profile picture. He also makes a mental note that there are a lot of girls with a very similiar name in the States and they all look extremely slutty. During school hours they are both on Mxit(which the teachers still don’t know how to regulate) and spend their breaks at the library on GMail chat if there’s a computer free (only losers use MSN these days). Whilst they’re there they both check out what’s happening in their lives with facebook and post sweet nothings on all their friends’ walls. He is continuously uploading pictures of them together and tagging them, she has a neverending stream of requests to confirm these tags. He wolfs down his dinner every night, so he can log onto Skype and chat to her about everything that happened on facebook and Mxit earlier that day, he tells her about all the bands that he’s friends with on his MySpace account, but hasn’t seen as they hardly ever play under 18 gigs. His dad doesn’t really approve, but since its ADSL it doesn’t really cost anything, if only his bloody wife would get all her mates onto Skype then the Telkom bill could be less than a grand. Last week our boy took a video of Crawford charging through the changing room after a screaming naked standard six brandishing a seven iron. It was so hilarious he mms’d it to her immediately, and it rapidly spread through the school on a Bluetooth trail. Within a week it’s one of the top viewed videos on YouTube and has to be pulled off the site after a Sunday Times article references it. Crawford gets an expulsion warning, but everyone else thinks he’s a legend - he has like over 400 friends on facebook. Almost every night before bed he sends her a goodnight sms, there’s normally a good morning one when he wakes up too – nothing like good old fashioned communications he reckons.

The more our lives are made simpler and quicker, the more complicated they have become. You have my postal address, email (one of the three), Skype, cellphone, work phone, home phone (just kidding –who has a landline?!). Find me on MSN, Yahoo! Messenger or GMail chat. Then you can just scribble on my wall, poke me or tag me in a pic on facebook, or tell me about stuff happening on MySpace. If all else fails you could just read my Blog (ha! got you there now!).

There used to be the odd stubborn (but very clever) guy who refused to get a cellphone, they’re a rare breed nowadays, even my 95 year old grandfather has one. The resisters of facebook are facing similar segregation, as idle chat seems to quickly revert to being friends, joining groups, poking and tagging. What’s next? Me thinks we’ll see a combination of facebook and Mxit rocking up on our phones, something that runs in the background of the phone’s operation and is constantly updated. Uploading photos is such a luss, imagine if you could do it seamlessly from your phone(anyone, Beuler, Nokia?). There’ll be the initial flood as everyone joins in on this hot trend, but it’ll probably just blow over like Mxit did(I assume) and people get bored of joining pointless groups with hilarious names. The one common denominator throughout the years is that it’s all just another tool to meet people. Going out for a drink, sitting on a beach and climbing a hill will never grow technologically outdated. Holding hands in the park, the nervous first kiss and fooling around under the covers in the dark – how could cyberdating and cybersex ever be able top that?

But if it gets close, I’ll be logged on.