What Was It Like Before the Internet?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2017

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A magical time of unfettered creativity but zero productivity, the days before the Internet were so strange that it’s hard to believe they were real. Clearly no one got anything done, ever. Jenny Slate performs Emma Rathbone’s “Before the Internet,” from The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs. Plus: Ten years ago, Susan Orlean, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote about a former laser physicist who had given up a successful career to become an origami artist. In time, Robert Lang became one of the world’s top practitioners,and origami became a surprising area of scientific activity, with government grants encouraging research into how materials fold. Orlean caught up with Lang at the OrigamiUSA convention recently, where she tried her hand at Lang’s popular goldfish—which has a hinged jaw and fins—and talked with him about the life lessons of folding paper.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before the Internet, you would just sit in an armchair with a book open on your lap, staring into space, or you'd quietly start sketching something in a notebook,
0:23.3	not sure what it was, but you'd let inspiration guide you, and then, whoop, turns out you'd
0:28.7	drawn a squiggly alligator.
0:32.4	You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:37.6	Before the internet, you'd have yawning summer afternoons.
0:41.6	When you'd flop down on one couch, then flop down on another, then decide to craft a fake
0:47.0	FBI card.
0:48.5	You get some paper from your dad's office, copy the FBI logo on your signature, laminate it
0:53.2	with scotch tape, put it in your
0:54.5	wallet, take it out of your wallet, look at it, then put it back in your wallet with a
0:58.6	secretive smile.
1:01.5	It was a heady time.
1:04.5	You'd be in some kind of art center wearing roomy overalls, looking at a tray of precious
1:10.2	gems, and you'd say, that's cat's eye.
1:13.1	And your friend would say, no, that's opal. And you'd say, that's definitely cat's eye. And there
1:18.9	would be no way to look it up, except if someone had a little booklet. Anyone got a little
1:24.1	booklet? You'd ask, looking around. Is there a booklet on this shit?
1:29.2	Then you'd walk outside and squint at the sky, just you in your body, not tethered to any network,
1:38.1	adrift by yourself in a world of strangers in the sunlight.
1:48.0	Before you. strangers in the sunlight. Before the internet, if you were in need of some facts,
1:52.0	you might actually decide to consult an old person,
1:55.0	like the one living in your finished basement.
	...

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