Tag Archives: nostalgia

15 years of Twitter

It was 15 years ago today when I finally decided to start Twitter. I say ‘finally decided’ because I was in a network of bloggers who were already on board and it seemed every day I was reading some new convert’s blog post about what a great tool it was. And they were right! I loved it so much, I wrote an ebook about how to get started:

But Twitter has changed, and I’m not just talking about Elon Musk’s blue verification fiasco. No, the changes started long before that. For educators, the glory days were 2007-2010 or 2011. That’s when there were amazing resources being shared for their value to teachers rather than businesses. That’s when educators shared ideas on blog posts and full conversations about the post would happen in the blog comments and on Twitter.

After that there was a shift. The tone went from ‘look at this great resource or interesting post’ to look at my post or my tweet, and corporate tweets seemed to be promoted by the same people. I’d share a blog post and it would be auto-retweeted by educators who used to read my posts before they were shared. And less conversations happened because the next tweet was more important than the previous one.

For the last few years Twitter has been more of a one-way distribution of my blog rather than a place I engage in. When I hit ‘Publish’ on this post, it auto-posts to Twitter, my blog’s Facebook page, and LinkedIn without me having to go to any of those sites… and sometime I won’t go to them for a few days at a time.

I long for the days of old-Twitter. I’d happily put up with the Fail Whale again (which popped up when servers couldn’t meet demand) just to get the old, exciting engagements back. But I’m afraid those little Twitter birds aren’t keeping the whale up like they used to. Twitter might survive the fiascos it faces today, but it won’t ever recapture what it lost long ago.

The purge

Our garage was a mess before our big renovation, and since then it has been an absolute disaster. A couple days ago we threw out a lot of garbage. Yesterday I started cleaning out boxes I’ve had stored for years. The last time I did go through them, I just went down a nostalgic path and kept everything. This time I purged.

I was pretty ruthless. I took a few photos of things, but I also dumped a lot, including photos too. I realized that if these things have stayed in boxes for 15 or 20+ years already, why keep them in a box for another 20? It’s not going to get easier moving them around at 74 years old.

Besides, I just don’t feel attached to ‘stuff’ anymore. Here’s an example:

I wore #13 in high school, and when the school got rid of the reversible caps and got a set with ear protection, the coach gave me my number… that was 1985 and I still have it. The blue & white #9’s and red suit were from the Maccabiah games in Israel… that was 1993. Well now I have that photo above and the items are off to the dump. These, and many other items that would otherwise end up in a box for many more years, have now been tossed out.

Some of the more unique items I dumped: the rough start of a script for a water polo movie; A collection of tacky owls that my grandmother bought for me over many years because she knew I liked owls (these were sold by my wife on Facebook marketplace for a whopping $40); Wedding albums I used to promote my wedding photography business (I gave enlargements of any photos I kept to the couple, and they got all the negatives, so I wasn’t throwing away anything unique); Animal bones… So, this probably needs an explanation… No I wasn’t a kid who tortured animals and kept their bones, I travelled all through the southern US with my dad and kept some pretty neat skulls I found on our adventures.

Stuff.

Stuff I’ll never use. Stuff I don’t need. Stuff that doesn’t need to sit in my garage for another decade or two.

I’ll keep a few items. Books I find hard to part with, and other nostalgic articles, but what was 6 or 7 boxes will probably become just one. Still just stuff, but a lot less of it.

Living in a Faraday cage

Our house was built in the early 1960’s. The good news, no asbestos in our walls, so we don’t have a massive abatement cost added to an already expensive renovation. The bad news, the plaster/drywall has wire mesh in it.

We used to complain to our phone service providers that the coverage was bad in our area, they even came with trucks outside our house to test reception. But it turns out it’s just bad reception in our house. We are basically living inside a Faraday cage, with large dead zones. ‘Dark’ areas where signals can’t reach or be sent out by our phones because we are surrounded by a metal cage in our walls. Hopefully the center wall on the main floor being removed will make this better.

Currently, when using a cell phone in my house I’m reminded of when we used to be tied to a specific location where the phones were on tables or were connected to the wall. I would be walking around talking to someone and the line goes silent. I would then need to backtrack to where I last had the signal and hope that I wasn’t disconnected. Once I’m reconnected, I have to stay locked in that one spot.

For most people mobile phones are mobile, but in my house we are still tethered to specific locations. For those of you that have nostalgia for the old days, this isn’t as much fun as it might sound.

Mixed tapes

A couple days ago I shared how we had to wait for songs to come on the radio to record them. Today this 7 year old memory came up on Facebook:

Oh, the hours put into making the perfect mix. The frustration of making a great mix, but realizing too late that one song should have been left off. The too long gaps between songs, which were actually better than the too short gaps with a song getting truncated (which at least happened less frequently, unless you were recording from the radio and had to cut off when the DJ started talking).

The challenge of getting the volume of songs consistent. The stretching of songs near the start and end of the tape. The tangles, pulled out and then retracted with a pencil.

But above all, the time it took to make a good mixed tape… that’s a thing of the past that carries a lot of nostalgia, and would be hard to meaningfully share with someone who never had to do it.

I had to wait

A couple days ago I heard a song I liked being played and I opened Shazam. This handy app told me the name and artist of the song, and shared a link to iTunes. It was in my library in under 2 minutes. Growing up, this was a different story.

I’d hear a song I liked on the radio and maybe they’d re-announce the title and artist at the end of the song. If not I’d just have to hear it again before finding out more. If it became popular and I really liked it, I’d have a cassette recorder next to the radio and hit the Play and Record buttons together simultaneously to record the song to listen to it later… often trying to time when the DJ would stop talking over the intro, so I didn’t get his voice, but maximized the amount of the song I got.

I would only buy the song if I heard and liked enough of all the songs from the album to justify buying the whole thing. I remember having an entire side of a cassette with either Freeze Frame or Tainted Love ‘on repeat’ because I kept recording either one as I heard them on the radio.

And there was no YouTube. If I wanted to see a music video, I had to watch MTV, with 3+ minute long commercial breaks, hoping they would show the video I wanted to see.

We don’t often think about the conveniences we have today compared to our childhood. Conveniences that are now expectations for kids, but would have been pure luxury or us.

Family recordings on 8 millimetre film, that was played on a projector. Waiting for a roll of film to be developed, after waiting for weeks or months for the roll of film to be finished and ready for processing. Missing your favourite show and hearing everyone talk about the episode that you wouldn’t see until reruns started being played 13 weeks later.

We had to wait. That waiting doesn’t happen anymore.

The land of giants

I remember a comic strip where a son and father in winter coats were in front of a house with big icicles on it.

Frame 1: The boy says, “Wow dad, look at the size of those icicles!”

Frame 2: The dad says, “They were a lot bigger when I was a kid.” And the kid responds, “Come down here”.

Frame 3: The dad is kneeling down, eye level with the kid, and the dad says, “Wow, look at the size of those icicles!”

– – –

It’s not always easy to see things from the same perspective as we did when we were younger. For me, I remember people around me being giants (in more ways than one).

My grandfather, Leon Bernstein or ‘Papa B’, was one of those giants. Last night on Facebook Messenger, I connected with my 2nd cousin Lee, his full name is Leon, named after my grandfather. He is my grandmother’s brother’s son, but Lee is only 4 years older than me. Still, growing up in Barbados as the oldest grandchild on one side and second oldest by 5 days on the other, Lee was so much bigger and older, and I looked up to him when we came to visit.

I feel blessed because when I was a kid, all the giants in my life were good to me. Wonderful parents, grandparents that spoiled me, aunts and uncles who treated my like their own, 2nd cousins who taught me football (soccer) and cricket.

Some people have to grow up with angry giants, and some with monsters, my land of giants were exceptionally loving and kind. I truly feel blessed, and I thank Lee for reminding me of this.

Photographs in my mind

We used to take our negatives to a film processor to have them developed. Then we waited. Long ago we waited for a week, and eventually that time was reduced to just an hour. We’d collect the envelopes of photographs and before we left the store we were going through our shots one-by-one.

This one isn’t focused. This one has a blurry arm from it moving during the shot. In this one her eyes are closed. In this one he looked away. And this one, yes this one goes in a frame.

I say this with a bit of nostalgia, for there was something I enjoyed about the process. About the not knowing how good a shot was until long after I took the shot. About the surprise of a shot being better or, sadly, worse than I thought.

Film also gave me something else that I miss. As a photographer using film, every click of the shutter costed money. This made me more selective about the shots I would take… and not take.

It is an odd thing that I have photographs burned into my memory, but they are photographs that I never took.

There is the lost kitten jumping after a minister’s tassels during a wedding. I was being paid as the photographer and didn’t want to ‘waste the shot’ since they paid me by the roll of film.

The shot I did not take of the salt flats of Utah that faded into the sky without a horizon line. A brilliant memory that probably would not have made a good photo anyway.

There was the shot I lined up at Pike Place in Seattle, of an older man sitting on the hood of a parked car enthralled in a book, while cops on the street behind him tended to a fender-bender. I can still see the image that I did not take, feeling like I was invading his privacy.

We seem so much more free to take photos now, always having a camera in our pocket, and not a concern of the cost of taking one more shot.

But of all the shots I didn’t take, the photographs that still linger in my memory. These come to me from an era when film was the only option and the cost of the next shot lingered in my mind.