*Before the Internet

“People and places were websites.”

That thought wouldn’t have made any sense in 1979, standing in the showroom of my local hi-fi audio retailer with saved-up money for my first stereo system. But it’s the clearest way I know to describe the information architecture of the world I grew up in.

The record store clerk who silently judged your purchases at the register — he was a database, and you were a search query. The friend whose stoner older brother owned every album was an algorithm, the source of the obscure material you’d have never been able to sample otherwise. The shop where you first spotted The Sporting News — a recommendation engine on a physical street. The barbershop that stocked Sports Illustrateds and Playboys, an aggregator (and purveyor of buzzcuts) with a clear sense of its audience.

The content infrastructure of my youth was invisible — the way anything load-bearing stays invisible until it’s gone. 

The functions were the same. You would stumble upon something new — a movie, band or author – decide whose opinion to trust about the new thing, and then soak up knowledge from people who knew more than you and spend time around guys who cared about these things. 

It’s just that the Internet relocated every one of these functions from a storefront to a screen.

Making the effort was the experience. Getting the music meant going somewhere, knowing someone, spending money. 

The series opens with buying an album and moves through magazines, late night television, Saturday Night Live, FM radio and the arrival of cable TV — the major media experiences of coming of age in that era. 

Each entry covers one territory and asks the same two questions. What made this experience excellent, and what have we gained or lost in the trade for it now?

The goal throughout is not to declare modern media bad and old media good. The Internet delivers miracles. Spotify hands you nearly every recorded song. Streaming gives you an entire TV series on a Tuesday afternoon without leaving the basement.

But the trade-offs are real and worth naming. 

The shared cultural experience of watching the same three channels and talking about it the next day, replaced by a fragmented universe of personalized feeds that reflect what we already believe. The moment of hearing something new on the radio, something you couldn’t have predicted or programmed, increasingly rare.

Back then, information arrived in intervals — a newspaper each morning, the evening news at 5:30, weekly magazines on Tuesdays — and editors touched everything before you saw it. Now individuals publish constantly to screens that travel with you, the content follows rather than waits, and the editorial layer that once slowed everything and in doing so improved it has largely disappeared.

None of it makes the present worse than the past, but it does make it different in ways that are still sorting themselves out.

What follows looks back to what those experiences actually brought, before we forget what they were. The entries follow. Read them in order or start anywhere: