Imagining the world Alex and Daphne inhabit in the mid 1980s
So imagine a time when you couldn’t just reach into your pocket and do anything you wished; make a call, reference a map, play a game, settle a bar bet, watch a cat video or laugh at a meme.
Or imagine a time before memes! I know, it’s a scary thought.
Welcome to 1983. The year of my first Alex Ballintine Mystery, Everybody’s Looking for Something.
Imagine further when that aren’t able to reach over and open up your laptop to do the same thing. Because in 1983 there were no laptops – well not really. They were the size of suitcases. In fact, there were almost no personal computers; the IBM-PC was only 2 years old and Apple was still working on the first Macintosh. There was no internet. The world was a very different place; how you got your information, your music and your movies was radically different than today.
In 1983, you had to go to where the world was, you couldn’t just click and have it come to you. I think that’s one of the most important things to remember about this period of time. Today, we choose where and when to watch a movie or TV show, listen to music, or contact a friend. In the 1980s, the telephone, television, radio and the movie theater were all stationary items you didn’t take with you; you had to go to them to consume popular culture.
For many of my readers this is not a revelation, since they lived through it. That includes myself. I was in graduate school in 1983. For the rest of you, this world of having to, for instance, sit in front of a TV at a certain time to watch a show, AND to have to listen to commercials must seem downright prehistoric.
The famous Arthur C. Clarke quote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (one of his three laws), also applies here. Much of what we take for granted today would have been unrecognizable to someone in 1983 if you plunked them down in the 2020s.
Such is the speed and change that has taken place in the intervening forty-some years. There are still times I consider the things my MacBook can do to be downright magical. My daughter grew up sitting on my lap watching me use a computer. Her laptop is now an extension of her body. The world is at her – and all of our – fingertips
For many younger readers, it might be hard to imagine the world in 1983. The very fact that the Internet did not exist tells you all you really need to know about the differences between 1983 and today.
Alex and Daphne had to dig for the information they were uncovering: making calls on phones that were stationary and attached to a wire in the wall, reading through files, waiting for fax machines.
Today, I’d suspect that many of my readers (including myself) don’t have a “landline”; we all have cell phones. In 1983, the first commercially available cellphone had just hit the market and cost $12,000 in 2024 dollars! That device also did not have a screen. You can thank Steve Jobs for popularizing that, but not until the iPhone in 2007.
In the 1980s, there were technologies for the consumption of content (the ones I mentioned above) but the internet and the personal computer (including the one in your pocket we call a smartphone) have facilitated the prolific creation of content that we take for granted today.
Don’t get me wrong, all sorts of different things were going on in the world in the 1980s; they but the vast majority didn’t make it into the mainstream. Pop culture 40 years ago had to pass through the gate keepers of print media, television and radio. Now culture is diversified and segmented, accessible to anyone. Alex Ballintine’s pop culture bent in 1983 could be focused on what came into the zeitgeist through a much narrower band.
One more thing about the difference between then and now. I remember driving down the Long Island Expressway one day in 1981. I passed a Mercedes statin wagon with a finely coiffed mom driving and two teenagers in the back, each wearing Sony Walkman headphones. They had to be Walkman headphones, since it was really the only portable music device then.
I remember being stunned by that sight, thinking “look at those two kids off in their own world.” It’s what makes Daphne’s headphones such a special thing in my books.
The ability to isolate yourself from the world while moving through that same world was just taking shape in the mid 1980s. It was considered almost offensive to be seen wearing headphones. Now we all use them to isolate ourselves and it’s another big thing that’s changed our culture.
The world in the 1980 was a very different place, and was still a world where is was easy to get away with murder. Unless Alex and Daphne were around.
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