Caity Weaver, “Let’s Party Like It’s 1994! (Sigh, Well, Perhaps Not,) New York Times, May 29, 2019, ST1.
By the fourth of fifth day of 1994, I’d stopped impulsively grabbing at empty spaces on my desk for my cellphone. But my reflex to quickly Google things never deteriorated. I began compiling my questions — a list of itches to be scratched at a later time — and spent the finals day of my week at the Brooklyn Public Library, to see what percentage of answers I could find in books. About 17 percent, it turned out. While I was not able to learn the location of the nearest FedEx, the best-selling compact mirror of all time or the name of a green Chanel nail polish I had recently seen in a discount store, I did learn the ingredients in Coca-Cola cake where Josephine Baker was born (St. Louis) and what happened to Joan Lunden after 1994.
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I copied down the Dewey Decimal number for her 2015 book “Had I Known,” and located it on a shelf. The subtitle took the wind out of my sails— “A Memoir of Survival.” In the first pages, I learned that Joan had gotten a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2014. The news made my silly assignment feel stupid. Impudent, even. Joan had seemed to delight in her health on the tape in 1994. Twenty-five years later, it was a success to be surviving.
COMMENT
The conceit of this article is that the 21-year old author is attempting to re-inhabit the pre-Internet Gen X past where,without Google at her fingertips, the library has to do. In 1994 the library would have had a shelf of phone books including Yellow Pages and it would have been easy for librarians to find the nearest FedEx. There would have been glossy women's magazines with ads for fashionable nail-polish colors. Nowadays, the Internet is the only way to find information about businesses and ephemeral fashion trends. The problem is, without the phone books and magazines there will be no record of these things. 25 years in the future, it will be much harder to tell what people in 2019 wore or ate because there is no time-stamped record.
The writer doesn’t say, but I imagine that the Coca-Cola cake recipe was in some kind of Southern cookbook along with cultural context for why anybody would make such an awful-sounding desert. Food history is an important kind of cultural history-- in order to re-create the past the author reports on trying flavorless “diet” recipes from a 1994 cookbook called Cooking Light. On the Internet recipes are disassociated. there's no sense of foodways. Knowing what people ate in the past may seem fairly trivial, but in 2019 the Lancet EAT Project has identified the food system as an existential threat to human existence.[1]
The "silly" assignment leads Weaver to two unexpectedly profound experiences. One is a confrontation with the passage of time, thhe other a quiet state of mind that emerges when the “mental screaming” induced by technological stimuli begins to calm. Perhaps instead of boasting that libraries aren’t quiet places any more, librarians in 2019 might do better to promote the advantages of mindfulness that are inherently connected with deep reading and the library experience.
In fact, researches have found that mental capability improves though electronic disconnection and contact with nature. [2] “The commotion” induced by technology began in 1998 when Microsoft started to bundle a web browser with its software. Doing the math, that's the same year the author was born.
[1] The EAT Lancet Commission on Food, Planet & Health
[2] Atchley, Ruth Ann, David L. Strayer, and Paul Atchley. "Creativity in the wild: Improving creative reasoning through immersion in natural settings." PloS one 7, no. 12 (2012): e51474.
[2] Atchley, Ruth Ann, David L. Strayer, and Paul Atchley. "Creativity in the wild: Improving creative reasoning through immersion in natural settings." PloS one 7, no. 12 (2012): e51474.
