Was there a time when people didn't know what other people were thinking? I can vouch for the fact that there was: it lasted, roughly speaking, from the dawn of man until the launch of YouTube. In the 1970s, if you wanted to know what other people were thinking you might read a novel, but to do that you would have to make a journey to a bookshop or a library or borrow it from another human being. This involved walking. If you wanted to know what they were thinking in Budapest you could try watching a film from the Hungarian underground. This involved getting a train to London and being quite bored. You could have a pen pal, of course, but this meant stamps and stamps meant money. Having a pen pal also required you to pretend your life was less interesting than it was: you had to talk about school and pets and holidays and the endless possibility of meeting one day. All the good stuff was left out and the sense of one's foreignness merely confirmed and underlined. Every form of communication seemed to enlarge the distance between one's own daily life and the lives of people who lived in places one could barely spell.

LRB 14 May 2009 | PDF Download