I gave an hour long talk today at the Berkman Center (link to event here, livestream, etc. will be up eventually), which mostly focused on how technology innovations interact with our extremely inequitable education systems.
I made a passing comment that in one school I visited in rural South Georgia, a common pejorative among kids was "that's so dial-up." The phrase was used to describe things that were of low quality. danah boyd was in the room, and it didn't surprise me to realize that after the talk, she tweeted out the one little anthropological finding/tid-bit that I had shared.
The responses to her tweet, did kind of surprise me:
**Interesting! Are those students are old enough to know what dial-up sounds like?
**The new "80s
**amazed dial up is even something they conceive of. We don't have TV shows and music mythologizing dial up do we??
**Interesting cultural memory. Like 8-tracks, which I haven't used
So, these tweets seem to assume that students were using dial-up as a historical cultural reference. They were not. They were referring to the only form of internet connection available at their houses, in this fairly affluent school in a fairly affluent, but rural town. They knew what dial-up sounded like, and could conceive of it, because the used it when they want to go online.
To put this in some broader context, the Pew Internet and American Life Project has some data about home Internet Adoption from their annual survey (values are the percentage of American adults over 18):
(data source)
So in 2008, when I did the interviews, 10% of American adults got online using dial-up, and 4% still do. There are still plenty of people in this country whose only connection to the internet is through their phone line. It's a number that is falling, but while dial-up may be a distant memory in suburbs around metropolitan centers, it's still a feature (barrier?) of life in rural America.