Dick Pountain /Idealog 380/ 4th March 2026 : 11:17am
I’ve just been reading Jonathan Haidt’s controversial book ‘The Anxious Generation’ about the way that smartphone ‘addiction’ is rewiring the brains of GenZ youth, but this column will not be about his recommendations for age limits on phone and social media use (I may return to that in a future one). No, this column is about the way electronic media have already rewired my own brain. I’ve never concealed the extent to which I depend upon Google, YouTube, Facebook, Substack and other online services, but I don’t really regard this as any more sinister than how we always depended on newspapers, magazines and television: all of them deceive as well as inform and it’s your job to learn how to distinguish.
Nowadays I seek my ‘tainments, both enter- and edu-, far more on YouTube than on TV (even when supplemented by Netflix). I watch gnarly maths and engineering videos from the likes of Veritasium, 3Blue1Brown and ColdFusion, and I’ve recently been finding YouTube a cheaper and more reliable source of certain kinds of old movies than either Amazon Prime or Netflix. I’m not talking about Mubi-fodder, classics or art-house, but rather pop cultural hits of 30 or 40 years ago – movies like for instance ‘Reality Bites’ from 1994, which I missed at the time but watched last night, and watching it toppled me down a surprising digital rabbit hole.
I won’t bother to describe the plot in any detail, but basically it’s about a bunch of GenX college friends trying to make a living after graduating into an economic downturn in the early ‘90s. It has nice performances from Ethan Hawke, Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller (who also directed), but what sent me down that hole was its sound-track of early ‘90s indie-rock by a bunch of bands none of whom I’d even heard of, but some of which I liked. That set me to wondering what I was doing in 1994 that had so insulated me from US popular culture, and that made me realise that being someone who never developed the habit of keeping diaries as some do, I had very little information from that far back to go on. Which in turn forced me to examine just how deep a digital footprint I’d left without even being aware of it at the time.
First obvious stop was Spotify to hear more of some of those bands like Crowded House, Me Phi Me and The Posies. Then to Wikipedia to check the backgrounds of these bands, those actors and the critical reception at the time. I wondered what I was actually listening to and doing back then, after my return from a spell in USA, after the collapse of the ‘underground press’ and starting of Dennis Publishing, before spending half the year in Italy, before writing books, before Spotify and most social media. I do have two grey filing cabinets full of paper invoices, tax returns, contracts, manuscripts, press releases, plus boxes of floppy disks of early work that never migrated to hard disk, in formats that I’ve no device that can read – but even if I had, navigating all this stuff would be colossally tedious and pointless since I’m not writing an autobiography.
So when did a reliable digital footprint really begin? I typed 1994 into Google Mail’s advanced search and got nothing. However stepping forward I first found something in 2007, a welcome from the Google team and my first Google mail:
Sat, 27 Oct 2007, 22:15
Tim - thanks for the Googlemail invite - I'm really going to try and like it. It imported my Cix address book OK which was a good start.
All the best
Dick
Google Mail was released in beta in 2004 and fully in 2009 but in between you needed an invite to the beta program, and mine came from a friend and fellow nerd (now sadly deceased), an ex-physicist who wrote multitasking networked software for a living. (I remember him when watching YouTube videos on spinors or p-adic numbers). Working upwards from this first mail unleashed a torrent of memories: photos of grandchildren; Richie Unterberger’s questions about The Velvet Underground; haggling with BT over my 512k ADSL service. It seemed this particular rabbit hole had opened up a whole past virtual world. But then it suddenly felt very fragile given the current state of the real world – is Google’s cloud really a safe store? That’s how I arrived at Google Takeout. Downloading the whole lot – mail and search histories, contacts, calendar, drive, website, blogs – came wrapped in the form of 19 files totalling 36Gbytes, a mere bagatelle nowadays which can all fit onto a novelty USB stick in the shape of a gold ingot…
[Dick Pountain was already too old for grunge]
