Going online used to be an event. My early online experience was probably similar to many of our old millennial readers like me: I went into the house’s Computer Room, booted up the PC, waited the agonizingly long time it took for it to load, then opened up a program that allowed me to connect, via a phone line, to The Internet. It was a process; there was a distinctive grating sound involved. It was much different than carrying around the whirr of the world in my pocket at all times. It is not a particularly memorable experience when I unlock my phone or open up my laptop. Going online as a kid was something I had to plan for; I even had limited hours of access! I think it was 10 a month when I started. I can’t even imagine spending such little time online.
I don’t know if that’s good or bad. (It’s bad. It’s obviously bad.) I got online pretty early—I think it would’ve been 1994. We had AOL, which was basically online for babies. But I was 11, and so more or less a baby in computer years. I was so early on AOL that I was part of what became known as Eternal September: I was one of the early AOL users to begin looking at and posting in USENET newsgroups, messing up all the carefully cultivated norms that had been established over the years. I am pretty sure I had email alerts when I got a reply. All of which is to say that I have heard a voice from the computer tell me “you’ve got mail” more than I have heard basically any other sound in my life.
Elwood Edwards, the man who said that phrase, died this week. He was 74. His wife worked at Quantum Link, AOL’s predecessor service, and he was paid $200 to say phrases that became part of the Internet lexicon: “welcome," “goodbye," “file’s done,” and “you’ve got mail.” He worked in various roles for WKYC in Cleveland, and in the last decade he also drove for Uber.
1990s nostalgia is in right now. Prices for '90s and '00s vintage clothing have jumped considerably. Enterprising designers now sell rap tees for every celebrity, no matter how minor. There are documentaries about mall stores and Beanie Babies. People are trying everything; I have gotten ads that claim pogs are back several times in the last few months. I knew it! I did a video series on my old pogs six years ago!
And, yeah, now I have nostalgia for the “you’ve got mail” guy, a very particular nostalgia that goes beyond hearing even a childhood song. Songs can be anywhere; hearing a snippet of Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” takes me to my seventh grade classroom (my teacher’s sister had recorded a dance cover); Duice’s “Dazzey Duks” would bring me back to a grade school dance. There’s a chance I might have that experience at some point, although you don't really hear “Dazzey Duks” as much in retail settings. But all those AOL-specific sounds are different. I had to be in a certain place, at a certain time, to hear the AOL voice—back in the computer room, previously my dad’s “den,” looking at a photo of my late grandfather on the wall, and clicking to see notes on which users had easily outwitted an 11-year-old on rec.sport.pro-wrestling.fantasy.
There have been quite a few stories this week about TikTok’s omnipresence and its role in Trump’s election. I don’t think online radicalization, in any direction, is something new; I certainly learned of new-to-me, terrible-for-everyone ideas not long after I first got online, back when the internet was smaller and safely confined to computers. But there's no doubt that the size of the audience is much larger now, and that the scale of the experience—the constant repetition and the invisible hand of the algorithm—is more overwhelming. Repetition has always been a big part of the online experience, but what is being repeated matters. Thirty years ago, my repetitions were preceded by a voice saying “you’ve got mail.” Now they are constant, less a series of distinct experiences than another reality imposed over this one. Feeling a sense of loss about that time may just be another retreat into nostalgia; I may not really miss the old internet. But I do think I miss when it was an experience, instead of something more like the weather.
