Digital is Old News…

Digital is ancient.

Simply put. Digital comes from Digitus. Fingers. Numbers. Indicating a true or false. Hence 1′s and 0′s. Smoke signals were the most primitive code. Thats right. While most Digital folk like to think that Sun microchips shine out of their @ sign. The reality is that most of these Digital things started life in less glamourous circumstances centuries or at least decades ago.

Tell that to the smug, spotty teenager the next time he is pounding his thumbs away on his cell phone.

I’m not kidding. Emoticons are ancient. Everything from emoticon happiness to emoticon tears have been recorded as early as 1862. ,,I,,

No shit. Back in the days when you had to at least double dip your quill in squid ink to write a word, in those days diplomats across the globe thought; “Fuck it, I’m smiley facing my adoration of the British proposal to annexe Lagos Island.”

To prove it here is an excerpt from an original article on Abraham Lincolns use of an emoticon in his speech notes in 1862 here:

And another one from Puck Magazine that shows you what they looked like back then here:

Take that you punk ass kids. Welcome to the 19th century.

Write that on your Facebook wall or your Myspace page or Twitter.

MySpace

Or at least a more stable version of it, has been around since the caveman about 32,000 years ago, although the Cave paintings were closer to MySpace pages in their sheer do-whatever-the-fuck-you-likedness they focused on illustrations of wild animals and feats of bravery and adventure.

Facebook Wall

The Facebook Wall equivalent in history is probably something we now consider to be graffiti, the “For good-times” on a bathroom stall or the Elroy “I woz ‘ere” equivalent of more recent times. However, there are well documented examples of writings on the wall that provided insights into the daily lives of the people who lived nearby. Pompeii is famous for its well preserved Wall posts containing everything from the mundane “On April 19th, I made bread” to the slightly more detailed “Apelles Mus and his brother Dexter each pleasurably had sex with two girls twice.”

Twitter

If you had to carve your twitter feeds onto a rock I am pretty sure 99% of the mundane crap people tweet about would remain in the space between their ears. The arbitrary 140 character limit is just annoying, it doesn’t help at all. People will still have more than 140 characters of diatribe to bore you shitless with. Instead we are treated to a serialised version of their thought process that ends up spanning across 6 or 7 tweets. The Police Academy franchise did this and it was equally annoying.

Consider then this little tweet from back in the BC.

The 10 Commandments.

Originally 14 or 15 commandments but then due to commandment character limits they are now tiny url’ed into the more commonly known 10 commandments.

Thats right, Moses and God were tweeting way before Ashton Kutcher made it cool. I bet they had more followers too.

So yeah, next time some “Digital” expert hits you up with a crazy idea that has NEVER been attempted before. Tell them to go suck it.