The deep­er we get into the 21st cen­tu­ry, the few­er aspects of our lives remain dis­con­nect­ed from the dig­i­tal realm. The con­ve­nience of this arrange­ment is unde­ni­able, but the increas­ing dif­fi­cul­ty of get­ting through a day with­out hear­ing the lat­est ver­sion of the pub­lic argu­ment about pri­va­cy and data secu­ri­ty sug­gests an accom­pa­ny­ing dis­com­fort as well. Have our online lives stolen our pri­va­cy — or have we per­haps freely giv­en it away? Some us now even look long­ing­ly back­ward to a time before not just social media but the inter­net as we know it, a time in which, we imag­ine, nobody had to wor­ry about the large-scale har­vest­ing and sale of per­son­al infor­ma­tion.

As the 1981 Night­line clip above reveals, these con­cerns went main­stream well before most Amer­i­cans owned com­put­ers, much less went online with them. Even so, Ted Kop­pel could open the seg­ment claim­ing that “as a soci­ety, we’ve become used to com­put­er prob­lems of one kind or anoth­er, just as we’ve become used to com­put­ers. We’re so used to them, in fact, that few of us stop to think of the extent to which they now play a role in our every­day lives, a role that shows every sign of grow­ing even big­ger.”

There fol­lows footage of the con­texts in which com­put­ers involved them­selves in the lives of the aver­age per­son in the ear­ly 80s: mak­ing a phone call, get­ting mon­ey from the ATM, buy­ing gro­ceries at the super­mar­ket, book­ing an air­line tick­et. Nev­er­the­less, actu­al­ly own­ing a com­put­er your­self could still get you inter­viewed on the news with the chy­ron “Home-Com­put­er Own­er” beneath your name. After we hear from one such enthu­si­ast, the scene switch­es to the head­quar­ters of the five-year-old Apple Com­put­er, “the Big Apple in this land of high tech­nol­o­gy.”

A 26-year-old Steve Jobs appears to describe his com­pa­ny’s cre­ation as “a 21st-cen­tu­ry bicy­cle that ampli­fies a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al abil­i­ty that man has,” one whose effects on soci­ety will “far out­strip even those that the petro­chem­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion has had.” But then comes the anti-com­put­er coun­ter­point: “Some peo­ple feel threat­ened by them,” says reporter Ken Kashi­wa­hara. “Some think they tend to dehu­man­ize, and oth­ers fear they may even­tu­al­ly take over their jobs.” Over satel­lite links, Kop­pel then brings on Jobs and inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Daniel Burn­ham for a debate about the promise and per­il of the com­put­er.

“The gov­ern­ment has the capac­i­ty, by using com­put­ers, to get all kinds of infor­ma­tion on us that we’re real­ly not even aware that they have,” Kop­pel asks Jobs, under­scor­ing Burn­ham’s line of argu­ment. “Isn’t that dan­ger­ous?” For Jobs, “the best pro­tec­tion against some­thing like that is a very lit­er­ate pub­lic, and in this case com­put­er lit­er­ate.” Pre­dict­ing, cor­rect­ly, that every house­hold in the coun­try would even­tu­al­ly have its own com­put­er, he finds reas­sur­ance in the inevitably wide dis­tri­b­u­tion of com­put­ing pow­er and com­put­er lit­er­a­cy across the pub­lic, mean­ing “that cen­tral­ized intel­li­gence will have the least effect on our lives with­out us know­ing it.”

But Burn­ham nev­er­the­less warns of “a tremen­dous dan­ger that the pub­lic is not aware of enough at this moment.” He did­n’t describe that dan­ger in the forms of over­grown e‑commerce or social media giants — both of those con­cepts hav­ing yet to be real­ized in any form — or even ide­o­log­i­cal­ly opposed for­eign coun­tries, but the Unit­ed States’ own Army and Cen­sus Bureau. What hap­pens when they decide to use the data in their pos­ses­sion to “break the rules”? Com­put­ers are here to stay, it seems, but so are our incli­na­tions as human beings, and one won­ders how clean­ly the two can ever be rec­on­ciled. As apho­rist Aaron Haspel puts it, “We can have pri­va­cy or we can have con­ve­nience, and we choose con­ve­nience, every time.”

via Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

Steve Jobs on Life: “Stay Hun­gry, Stay Fool­ish”

A Young Steve Jobs Teach­es a Class at MIT (1992)

Steve Jobs Mus­es on What’s Wrong with Amer­i­can Edu­ca­tion, 1995

Steve Jobs Shares a Secret for Suc­cess: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Steve Jobs Nar­rates the First “Think Dif­fer­ent” Ad (Nev­er Aired)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Every liv­ing adult has wit­nessed enough tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment in their life­time to mar­vel at just how much has changed, and dig­i­tal stream­ing and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions hap­pen to be areas where the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary change seems to have tak­en place. We take for grant­ed that the present resem­bles the past not at all, and that the future will look unimag­in­ably dif­fer­ent. So the nar­ra­tive of lin­ear progress tells us. But that sto­ry is nev­er as tri­umphant­ly sim­ple as it seems.

In one salient coun­terex­am­ple, we find that not only did livestream­ing music and news exist in the­o­ry long before the inter­net, but it exist­ed in actu­al practice—at the very dawn of record­ing tech­nol­o­gy, tele­pho­ny, and gen­er­al elec­tri­fi­ca­tion. First devel­oped in France in 1881 by inven­tor Clement Ader, who called his sys­tem the Théâtro­phone, the device allowed users to expe­ri­ence “the trans­mis­sion of music and oth­er enter­tain­ment over a tele­phone line,” notes the site Bob’s Old Phones, “using very sen­si­tive micro­phones of [Ader’s] own inven­tion and his own receivers.”

The pre-radio tech­nol­o­gy was ahead of its time in many ways, as Michael Der­van explains at The Irish Times. The Théâtro­phone “could trans­mit two-chan­nel, mul­ti-micro­phone relays of the­atre and opera over phone lines for lis­ten­ing on head­phones. The use of dif­fer­ent sig­nals for the two ears cre­at­ed a stereo effect.” Users sub­scribed to the ser­vice, and it proved pop­u­lar enough to receive an entry in the 1889 edi­tion of The Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer ref­er­ence guide, which defined it as “a tele­phone by which one can have soupçons of the­atri­cal decla­ma­tion for half a franc.”

In 1896 “the Belle Epoque pop artist Jules Cheret immor­tal­ized the the­at­ro­phone,” writes Tanya Basu at Men­tal Floss, “in a lith­o­graph fea­tur­ing a woman in a yel­low dress, grin­ning as she pre­sum­ably lis­tened to an opera feed.” Vic­tor Hugo got to try it out. “It’s very strange,” he wrote. “It starts with two ear muffs on the wall, and we hear the opera; we change ear­muffs and hear the French The­atre, Coquelin. And we change again and hear the Opera Comique. The chil­dren and I were delight­ed.”

Though The Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer also called it “the lat­est thing to catch [Parisians’] ears and their cen­times,” the inno­va­tion had already by that time spread else­where in Europe. Inven­tor Tivador Puskas cre­at­ed a “stream­ing” sys­tem in Budapest called Tele­fon Her­mon­do (Tele­phone Her­ald), Bob’s Old Phones points out, “which broad­cast news and stock mar­ket infor­ma­tion over tele­phone lines.” Unlike Ader’s sys­tem, sub­scribers could “call in to the tele­phone switch­board and be con­nect­ed to the broad­cast of their choice. The sys­tem was quite suc­cess­ful and was wide­ly report­ed over­seas.”

The mech­a­nism was, of course, quite dif­fer­ent from dig­i­tal stream­ing, and quite lim­it­ed by our stan­dards, but the basic deliv­ery sys­tem was sim­i­lar enough. A third such ser­vice worked a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. The Elec­tro­phone sys­tem, formed in Lon­don in 1884, com­bined its pre­de­ces­sors’ ideas: broad­cast­ing both news and musi­cal enter­tain­ment. Play­back options were expand­ed, with both head­phones and a speak­er-like mega­phone attach­ment.

Addi­tion­al­ly, users had a micro­phone so that they could “talk to the Cen­tral Office and request dif­fer­ent pro­grams.” The addi­tion of inter­ac­tiv­i­ty came at a pre­mi­um. “The Elec­tro­phone ser­vice was expen­sive,” writes Der­van, “£5 a year at a time when that sum would have cov­ered a cou­ple months rent.” Addi­tion­al­ly, “the expe­ri­ence was com­mu­nal rather than soli­tary.” Sub­scribers would gath­er in groups to lis­ten, and “some of the pho­tographs” of these ses­sions resem­ble “images of addicts in an old-style opi­um den”—or of Vic­to­ri­ans gath­ered at a séance.

The com­pa­ny lat­er gave recu­per­at­ing WWI ser­vice­men access to the ser­vice, which height­ened its pro­file. But these ear­ly livestream­ing services—if we may so call them—were not com­mer­cial­ly viable, and “radio killed the ven­ture off in the 1920s” with its uni­ver­sal acces­si­bil­i­ty and appeal to adver­tis­ers and gov­ern­ments. This seem­ing evo­lu­tion­ary dead end might have been a dis­tant ances­tor of stream­ing live con­certs and events, though no one could have fore­seen it at the time. No one save sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers.

Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopi­an nov­el Look­ing Back­ward imag­ined a device very like the Théâtro­phone in his vision of the year 2000. And in 1909, E.M. Forster drew on ear­ly stream­ing ser­vices and oth­er ear­ly telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions advances for his vision­ary short sto­ry “The Machine Stops,” which extrap­o­lat­ed the more iso­lat­ing ten­den­cies of the tech­nol­o­gy to pre­dict, as play­wright Neil Duffield remarks, “the inter­net in the days before even radio was a mass medi­um.”

via Ted Gioia/The Irish Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the Inter­net in 8 Min­utes

Hear the First Record­ing of the Human Voice (1860)

How an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Monk Invent­ed the First Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness