Back To The Future

Lou: You gonna order something, kid?
Marty McFly: Ah, yeah… Give me – Give me a Tab.
Lou: Tab? I can’t give you a tab unless you order something.
Marty McFly: All right, give me a Pepsi Free.
Lou: You want a Pepsi, PAL, you’re gonna pay for it.

Back To The Future is one of my favorite movies. Time travel has always been a human fascination, and I am no different. BTTF put a comedic bent on what many seriously cobsider to be the last frontier of adventure. Forget space. What if we could travel along the space-time continuum?

So quite naturally I was amused when Amarillo Magazine write Jennie Treadway-Miller posted some images of what social network ads might have looked like had they been introduced in 1955. You know. When the Beaver roamed your neighborhood. Father always knew best. And Ike was President.

Of course, it can be dangerous trying to impose what we know now onto a distant past era. But then again, maybe if we were Marty McFly and could travel back to 1955, we would try to intervene, stopping scientists and tinkerers from ever developing personal computers, the internet and everything that is so addictive about them.

But Dr. Emmett Brown was always right in instructing Marty to tread carefully in the past. The Cubs needed to keep their World Series absence streak intact on their own accord.

And Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al needed to be born and allowed to prosper on their own. With 500 million worldwide users, Facebook is the third-largest nation in the world. And it has its very own movie coming out the 1st of October.

Still, those mock ads are a playful look at how it mighta been had all this newfangled stuff happened over half a century ago.

Today, it is hard to imagine a life without social networks. Truthfully, they are just electronic versions of the grapevine and backyard fence, where stories and gossip were once exchanged freely (albeit with much slower velocity). In 1955, people actually talked to one another, rather than via disjointed tweets and status updates.

But had my parents’ generation possessed such online destinations as we do today, I bet the ads would have looked a lot like these mock-ups: a Jestonesque flair (because space was then considered the Next Big Thing), lots of hokey smiling faces (everyone was happy, right?), and terribly patronizing copywriting that assumed people were as dumb as dirt. I mean, c’mon…the Facebook ad even shows two people with a bi-directional arrow between them, indicating…drumroll, please…interaction.

We have indeed come a long way since 1955. Many folks are still trying to figure out if it has all been for the good. As for me, I’m glad we did evolve. While I may not have as much face time with people as I once did (testified to by the fact that I am typing this, and you are reading it), I can say without fabrication that I have more interaction with friends and family than I ever did. Way more. I simply never could have imagined having the ability to peel back the layers of my life, like an onion, and find all of the people who helped me grow.

If I were Marty McFly and headed back to 1955, I wouldn’t caution them a bit about social networks. I would stand clear of any progress I saw that might indicate an impending electronic revolution about to take place. And I, just like Marty, would say to anyone casting doubt on such change, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”

Dr “Striking, Miraculous and Sublime” Gerlich