Social Media Isn’t Social Any Longer (But It Used To Be)

It all started here:

Click = big

CB Simulator

CompuServe CB Simulator was the first dedicated online chat service that was widely available to the public. It was developed by a CompuServe executive, Alexander “Sandy” Trevor, and released by CompuServe on February 21, 1980, as the first public, commercial multi-user chat program.

At that time, most people were familiar with citizens band radio, often abbreviated as CB radio, but multi-user chat and instant messaging were largely unknown. CompuServe CB used the CB radio paradigm to help users understand the new concept. Like CB radio it had 40 “channels” and commands like “tune”, “squelch”, and “monitor”. CompuServe CB quickly became the largest single product on CompuServe despite virtually no marketing. When 40 channels was not enough, additional “bands” were added, such as the “Adult” band.

Back then, I was working for a firm that did consulting about “new electronic media.” That company had a free CompuServe account. I could spend a lot of time in CB (it was referred to as that by users) — and did.

So when I speak about “social media,” it’s from the perspective that I was damn well on it before most people ever were and before the term was even coined!

The timeframe: Ronald Regan was President. Network television was experiencing better times (Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, The Equalizer, etc). The economy was booming. The Apple II competed against machines from Tandy/Radio Shack, Commodore, and even Timex-Sinclair(!).

Signing into CompuServe required an ID number supplied by them with a password supplied by you. The User ID would be something like 70007,7834 (or somesuch). It was all numbers. No human names were ever used.

The CB Simulator worked like this: You picked a channel to go on and you picked a handle for yourself. You didn’t use your CompuServe User ID number — but people could get your ID easily. It was not considered a big deal. User IDs weren’t used to make it all user-friendly. Human beings tend to deal with words like names — a handle — far easier than a string of numbers.

Once inside CB, you could start chatting. This wasn’t a neatly defined operation like Twitter is. It was all ASCII text. And there wasn’t any box in which to enter what you wanted to type. You would start to type and your typing would be interrupted by the scrolling talk of the other people in that channel! It was a very messy process that flummoxed people until they either caught on to what was happening or were told how it worked by someone who saw that person’s words getting cut off when they hit Return before finishing what they were typing (what you typed didn’t show up letter-by-letter in real-time; you had to press Enter/Return to send, like the Tweet button on Twitter, but you didn’t know that to start!).

There was no hand-holding on-ramp. No real instructions other than the commands used within CB, which included starting a channel, switching to another channel, squelching someone (blocking their tweets it would be known as today), changing your handle, and several others. These tips could be called up within CB by hitting the Control key with a character (like Control-H or ^H). The commands themselves used a backslash to distinguish them from text (such as /squ for squelch). (No one could see the command you typed although you could get a rise out of out someone by putting a space before a command like squelch: [space]/squelch [CB handle] so they would think you were trying to mute them.)

Now here’s the thing about handles on CB. You could use whatever you wanted. There was no obscenity filter that I can recall. Nor was there was there any obscenity filter in what you could type into CB. You could call someone, for instance, a fag or a homo or a queer. And I bring up those examples to point out something else about CB back then. Channel 33 was selected by gay users for where they could hang out. Sure, they could go to other channels too, but if you were gay and wanted to talk about gay stuff, you went to Channel 33. Non-gay people generally stayed out of Channel 33. And if they popped in to harass anyone (see three terms cited earlier), they’d quickly regret it by suddenly being locked out of CB for that night! What no one ever generally said was that CB was filled with ghost moderators who had the power to warn or to punish.

But here’s the other thing about CB that set it apart from today’s “social media” — it was basically self-policing. Other users would tell someone when they were not being nice and to cut it out. It was really very rare to see someone get locked out for the night. The moderators really didn’t have much to do — and so they chatted with the users (and we didn’t know they were mods unless someone who was clued-in told us privately).

And I mentioned the timeframe of all of this to make another point. Reagan was President. I can imagine people out there reading this thinking that must have been a hot topic on CB.

No.

Nor was the AIDS crisis.

Neither were natural disasters.

Or terror events (you know, they were still happening outside the U.S. then).

All of you people still using Twitter must be confused as hell. You must be wondering (or, as they do on Twitter, shouting!) “Well, what did people talk about then?!”

Silly stuff. The kind of things you’d do at a fun party.

Because that’s what being on CB was like. It wasn’t a Power Microphone to blast people with. It was a party. It was f-u-n.

And it was all text. There weren’t links to anything (http and HTML hadn’t been invented yet). There were no images (are you kidding me? Images? This was 300 bits-per-second speed! The average image would have taken a week or two to upload!). There was no audio or video (it’d probably take a year to upload a short video clip!). The most thrilling — or annoying — thing someone could do was sneak in a Control character sequence that might make your computer beep or your screen clear. And that happened too few times for me to dredge my mind to even do a count.

And social? Yes. People would organize real-world parties to meet others who were in CB. I was younger then, not so much of a crank, and I actually went to one of these parties. It was held at someone’s private home on Long Island. I got to see some people whose handles I’d seen in CB. One woman, who sold MLM cosmetics as her job, flew all the way in from California! One guy who worked for Commodore came in from Pennsylvania.

Online romances are nothing new. One couple met in CB and wound up getting married in real life. (See the Wikipedia article for ChrisDOS.)

Was there a dark side? Yes. But this is as dark as it got: People pretending to be who they weren’t and playing with the emotions of other people, so that they would become romantically involved based on one person lying to another. Hearts got broken.

Now stop and think about all of that.

And answer these questions:

Would you want to meet the people whose tweets you’ve been reading?

Would you want those people in your home?

Have you been having anything that could be called fun on Twitter?

Do you actually look forward to using Twitter because it’s a pleasant experience?

CB was fun, it was pleasant, the people were nice, and we weren’t afraid to meet one another.

Did you bother to enlarge the ad at the top of this post? Because here comes the punchline.

It cost five dollars an hour to use CompuServe. That was more than the minimum wage at the time. So that would be anywhere from US$25-$30 today — per hour. (There was one guy who racked up a bill of about a thousand dollars in a month!)

Maybe that partially explains why Twitter has become was it is.

Because Twitter is free, it’s taken for granted.

Because Twitter is free, anyone can use it.

And despite the fact that the infrastructure and reach of Twitter was unimaginable to anyone using CB back then and is several orders of magnitude beyond CB, Twitter by comparison is actually less than what CB was.

It’s not a question of technology. It’s a question of people.

Twitter is now a haven for people with grudges.

And I have to wonder: How different would a Twitter-like service be if people had to pay for it? Would the same people use it? Would they willing to pay to air their grievances?

CB Simulator was when social media was actually social.

None of you know what you’ve missed.

And now the hellhole present:

SOCIAL MEDIA WAS A MISTAKE