Electronic Matchmaking Before the Internet

This is a fascinating essay from today's Wall Street Journal -- about a computer matchmaking project in 1965.

The piece is interesting because of its historical content, but it also resonates with me because of the way my husband and I met: through personals, in 1984. It sounds so archaic now: We both placed ads in the Des Moines Register (I lived in Des Moines; he lived in Ames, which is about 40 miles north of DM).

This project involved writing the ad, contacting the newspaper, paying for the ad, and then receiving from the newspaper's advertising department a big envelope full of replies. And then deciding who to contact, and writing letters in reply, mailing them, waiting for response.

It was so -- drawn out and so, well, personal: All those handwritten letters from respondents. (*1)

My husband's ad and mine launched a bizarre chain of events: We answered each other's ads; realized the other was a person someone else had already tried to set each other up with; another set of letters crossed in the mail because of that realization, as did the letters we'd written in reply to the letters written in reply to the ad. (If you can follow that...)

You get the drift. Wierd. (*2)

Anyway, I have no real point here except that I'm fascinated to discover that 20 years earlier, a group of people at Harvard attempted a form of what we know think of as electronic matchmaking. I think, based on the author's description of that effort, that I'm glad I used pen-and-ink. If nothing else, I had a hell of a lot more control over the outcome than her mother did.

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*1: My big envelope of replies was heavy on responses with "drawer numbers" as the return address, "drawer numbers" being the address of men at the state penitentiary.

*2: By the time I realized how many weird coincidences were involved, I had no desire to go on a "date" with the guy. It sounded too much like a recipe for disaster.... And yet, here he and I are, bearing down on the 25th anniversary of that first date. Which, to make things weird beyond belief, consisted of us seeing the film "Liquid Sky," which, let me say for the record, is absolutely not a movie you want to see with someone you don't know.

A Couple of Good Rants

I'm always up for a good rant, especially when it's a reasoned, thoughtful rant. Just read two such critters at Tony Comstock's blog. Here and here. (In case you're wondering: The blogs I read cover a spectrum of topics: food, beer, economics, politics, publishing, and so forth. As far as I'm concerned, it's all fodder for my creative mind, such as it is.)

Twitter Is For the Cool Kids. Facebook Is . . . .Not?

Heee heee..... This is truly funny -- and for all I know, maybe even true.

Honesty compels me to disclose, re. Facebook, that I set up an account only so that -- I could see photos of our new (and probably only) grandchild. His parents, being, ahem, somewhat younger, informed us it would be easier to stay in touch that way. (Apparently not, however: So far they've I-phoned us every photo of the baby BEFORE they've posted it at F'book.)

Tip o' the mug to Stan for sending me to this hoot-inducing article -- Stan,who claims to be older than me, but I don't believe it. (My main question, however, is this: Why in the world am I suddenly so aware of my age??? It's something I otherwise rarely think about. Is Twitter inducing age-pains?)

The Never-Ending Battle Between Professors and Students

Last week, there was an unintentionally hilarious article in the New York Times about the on-going debate over grading, students, and expectations. No surprise, among the denizens of academia -- and the escapees like me -- this provoked a fair amount of commentary. I

f you're interested, there's this at Scholars & Rogues. (The comments will provide considerable entertainment because the back-and-forth between and among commentators turned into a kids versus oldsters battle.)

Then there's this from the always-worth-reading Alan Jacobs, who also has a link to an equally hilarious response from a writer for The New Republic.

Free Information, Not-Free Information, and the Tension Between Them

This morning I read an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (no, you liberals! That's not an oxymoron.) The piece is titled "Information Wants to Be Expensive," and concerned the whole newspapers-are-dying problem. (As always, there's no way to know if the WSJ provides free access or not.)

Anyway, the author mentioned Stewart Brand's now-legendary comment about information wanting to be free -- and then noted that the "free" statement was only part of a longer comment.

So naturally, the historian in me wanted whole story. You can read Brand's original comments (which he made at the now-famous, in some circles, 1984 "hackers" conference) here. (The link will take you to an e-version of the May 1985 issue of Whole Earth Review. Brand's comments -- and Steven Wozniak's reply -- begin on p. 49.)

Then he expounded on the idea in a 1987 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT:

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

The book itself has not been digitized (at least not as near as I can tell), but I found the full quote here. More here. Two useful books on the history of all this: Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture, and John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said. (Full disclosure: I've read Markoff's book, and I read Fred Turner's dissertation, on which he based his book, but not the book itself. It's on my list.)

Nudging, Traffic, and Other Stuff With Which to Become Distracted

Just what I need: yet another distraction. But this is worth it. First, this from last Sunday's Times, to which I'd been meaning to post a link. And today was reminded to do so by this from Alan Jacobs, one of my favorite bloggers. (Make sure to click through to the Wired story and Vanderbilt's site.)

And all of that reminds of me of the remarkable work of E. O. Wilson . (I had a chance to hear him speak a few years ago. Amazing.)