The other day, in response to “Like” buttons popping up all over the internet and Facebook officially staking its claim as the future overlord of our online lives, I thought it would be fun to dig up an article from my college newspaper published immediately after the University of Chicago was brought into the then-exclusive Facebook world. It’s funny to think about a time when we were still calling it thefacebook.com, you had to have a legitimate email address from a small group of approved schools to join, and none of us could really see much of a future for it.
That didn’t stop us from checking it obsessively, adding people as “friends” that we hadn’t spoken to in years, and following along with Zuckerberg as he added photo albums, status updates, and a news feed to our lives. Sure, we complained about every change (one would think we would have learned to trust them), but we kept going back, and now, six years later, Facebook has passed Google as the most visited web site in the United States.
Anyway, reading that old article got me thinking about first impressions for other things in our lives that we now take for granted. Now that all these old articles are archived, mostly for free, online, it’s easy to go back and see what we thought of these unfamiliar items and people when we first came into contact with them. Almost all of the articles cited here are from The New York Times, mostly because its archive is so conveniently comprehensive and easy to search. Let’s start with something that I now own six of (not all of them still functioning).
The iPod
A lot of the initial press that the iPod generated seems sort of laughably understated today, but it made sense to not freak out about it when it was introduced. It’s not like Apple invented digital music files, after all, and the Mac exclusivity at the time did severely limit the market, especially considering that a lot fewer people had Macs back then (Johanna and I are both examples of recent converts).
That said, shouldn’t we have known this was a big deal? I mean, it was inevitable that Apple would make a PC-friendly version, right? The closest this NYTimes article comes to speculation about that possibility is this sentence: “Apple said it had not yet decided whether to introduce a version of the music player for computers with the Windows operating system, which is used by more than 90 percent of personal computer users.”
Of Modern Proportions 