People my exact age have a strange relationship with the Internet, for a very specific reason: we were college freshman in Fall 1996, the year the Internet exploded on college campuses. It was a strange time: none of the juniors or seniors really used email, but all of the freshmen did. Most freshmen used AIM or ICQ to communicate with each other on campus; if you got a phone call, it was probably an upperclassmen. And so on. So while most of the campus was effectively going to college in 1975, most the freshman were effectively going to college in 2002. I suspect the gap has never been as large, before or since. It was truly a technological divide — between people born merely a few years apart.
It was also a simpler time in regard to the internet itself. We were amazed by the trivial — chain email forwards were still cool, and could still produce mass hysteria — and spent much of time trying to find things, which meant going through Webcrawler, Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista, and all the rest of the awful search enginges until you succeeded. But it wasn’t clear what we were looking for — without the blogs, the .MP3s, online poker, or facebook, there was nothing really to do online except look at pornography or play silly games or just generally marvel at the whole situation.
It was, perhaps, the perfect moment of the modern age to be a college freshman.
The other option, of course, was to get rich. None of us bothered, but it wasn’t for lack of being very, very close to some huge ideas. Two that come to mind:
(1) The great domain-name buy-up. It wasn’t until 1997 or so that people realized the value of becoming a domain-name troll — that is, to buy up the domain names for every famous product you can think of, and then hold those names hostage until the company paid you off in the five figures. Many, many people got rich on this in 1997 (domains like coke.com went for tens of thousands of dollars, after the original registrant paid $5 or so). Even crazier was the college “copy” sites — people who bought up harvard.com, yale.com, and the like, and then threw some harcore porn on them for visitors who forgot to do .edu (an uber-common occurance in1996), and waited until the universities cried uncle and paid them off to sell the domain name. None of this became commonplace until 1997, but I had an actual conversation in my dorm room freshman year in which a friend of mine mused that it would be awesome to buy hamilton.com and put an alternative site up that would compete with the then-pathetic college web page (visible here via archive.org). It never dawned on us that it could be a profitable venture. Little did we know that people were about to start buying up thousands of domain names — including hamilton.com — and would be making 10,000% return on them in the Spring.
(2) Facebook. I’m not saying we were close to inventing facebook in 1996. But we were having the conversation…and ultimately decided that facebook would be stupid. See, here’s what happened: like all liberal arts colleges, Hamilton produced an actual “facebook” each fall, which had pictures of all the new freshman and info on what high school they went to and where they were from. Facebooks had been issued since the 20’s at Hamilton, and they had even been modified with great features (e.g. index that was alphabetical by first name) that made them perfectly suited to their functional purposes (i.e. upperclassmen checking out freshman girls; helping your roommate figure out at breakfast who he/she hooked up with last night). A great item, and everyone’s copy was well-worn each year by the middle of October.
But in Fall 1996, Hamilton College made a stupid (prophetic?) decision: they didn’t issue a hard-copy freshman facebook. Intead, they put the whole thing online. And we all thought it wast he most bone-headed decision. It started an honest-to-god revolt. People were pissed. Who the hell wanted to sit at their computer and look at pictures and info about the freshmen? Why couldn’t we just have a hard-copy book to flip through? To all of us, it reeked of out-of-touch adults trying to use the internet for things it just wansn’t meant for. People were so dismissive of it that I don’t think I even used the online book twice. In fact, there was such an outcry that the school changed direction and printed a harcopy freshman 1996 facebook just before Christmas. Yeah.
Looking back on it, of course, it seems so simple. We could have had facebook.com (domain name was still available!) when Zuckerman et. al. were still in elementary school. It was all there for the taking, but we just didn’t see it. But it wasn’t that simple. We didn’t have the tools to even think about the tools we’d need to create the tools that could produce facebook.com. It wasn’t until Fall 1997 — when a friend emailed me an MP3 — that anyone even started thinking big-picture about how this was going to change everything about college. Nor did we have the environment. Even we did invent facebook.com in Fall 1996, it would have flopped. None of the upperclassmen even used the internet. No one had a digital camera to upload pictures. And no one had the mobile internet capability to use the site from anywhere except their own room.
Which is to say, I don’t feel bad about not inventing Facebook. Nor do I feel bad about thinking the Hamilton administration made a huge mistake putting the 1996 facebook online.
There’s one small (and not particularly important, but I’ll share nevertheless) piece of history I’m pretty sure you have a bit off. When it comes to communication–especially intra-campus communication–colleges were one place where 1995 was not the same as 1975. In 1975, I’m almost certain that relatively few dorm rooms had phones (10%? 2%?); there was a phone in each hall. By 1995 that number must have been–hell, you’d know better than I would. Was it almost 100%?
While I’m basing this on my knowledge of just a few places (Duke transitioned in the mid 80s and I know my siblings didn’t have their own lines in late 70s/early 80s), I see no reason to think these schools were special.
Dan — that’s a really good point about intra-campus communication in 1975. Definitely still a phone-in-the-hall situation from everything I’ve heard. And yeah, phone in every room in Fall 1996. Of course, as I mentioned, the only thing i used the phone for was to call my parents or answer calls from upperclassmen. By my senior year, I communicated on campus strictly through IM or email, both of which, of course, are now dinosaurs to texts, tweets, and FB.
On this point, one of the funny incongruences at Hamilton in the late 90’s was the advertising of fraternity parties. It was still done via flyers left on dining hall tables and posted around campus, plus photocopied invitations placed in campus mailboxes. That was even true my senior year, when online campus communications had taken over virtually everything else. In fact, school-related hard copy mail had slowed to a trickle by Spring 2000. Except for frat party advertising. THAT was still 1975.
A funny thing just occurred to me: when in came to intra-campus communication, most of my college career was little different from, say, the 1780s. Seriously. You communicated with someone either 1) when you ran into them, or 2) by writing a note on their door. Wow, how quaint.