Technology was vastly different in my college years from 1992 to 1997.

I had no cell phone, there was no social media, no dating apps… if I saw a pretty girl on campus I would have to introduce myself, and get the the number to her landline! I had a little notebook with the phone numbers of my friends and the girls I wanted to date…

I used to call girls and ask them on a real date, typically a movie or we would grab a bite to eat at the local New Jersey diner. There were thousands of girls on my college campus, so I always had a date on any weekend night.

I always paid, and I kept my 10 year old used Toyota clean, because I knew girls liked a clean car, and a cleancut guy. I was overly fascinated by the opposite gender in my college years, and I always have a job or three to pay for dates and the constant repairs on my old car.

This is how I looked in my 20’s:

I was not ugly, and I always kept my image cleancut. I saw dating as a numbers game (this worked later in my sales career)… if I talked to 100 girls some would have boyfriends, some would have zero interest in me, and some would gladly give me their number.

Being cleancut as a young man was an advantage. Very few college kids in the 1990’s had body ink or visible tattoos, until college girls in the 1990’s started the Tramp Stamp tattoo trend. Ugh.

If I got fired from one of my part-time jobs I would get hired somewhere else by the end of the day.

Even now at age 51 I can get hired for any sales job in 20 seconds.

Back to the dating scene in the 1990’s….

There was zero texting because no one had cell phones in 1992, and there was no Instagram, no facebook where a guy could “slip into the DM’s”. Porn was only available in dirty magazines sold at “Triple XXX” places. There was no Only Fans, no Netflix and Chill, just real conversations, either on the phone or in person.

I didn’t actually buy a cell phone until I was married in 1997, and my wife was pregnant with our daughter. I got the phone so she could call me if she went into labor.

When I got my first cell phone in 1997 it did NOT have a camera, and at the time only 20% of American adults even owned a cell phone. My first phone had no text capability or internet, it could only make calls and save phone numbers. First camera phone in the USA came out in the summer of 2000.

I was still using the electric typewriter at the school library to write term papers, by 1997 I started to go to the “computer lab” to write my papers on the school computer, and I would save a copy on a little hard disk.

The first time I used email was after I got my degree!

My parents still had a paper newspaper delivered to our home, and I still got a paper newspaper delivered to my home until around 2004.

I want to a university in South Jersey, while Clinton was President, but I don’t remember any of my fellow students being political at all. I’m sure we had political groups on campus, but there was not an obvious Right vs. Left debate or conflict at the time.

I was NOT a Christian back then, I might have gone to Church on Christmas Eve with me parents… and I only remember one friend (Leah) who was openly Christian and telling folks about her Faith.

I was in the music department at my college, so there were openly gay students, but no trans or non-gender or binary or any of the other classifications that popped up in the last 10 years.

The gay guys were feminine, the lesbian girls had short hair and wore construction boots, that was the extent of it. I think my generation was the first generation in which folks were openly gay outside of the city centers. I do NOT remember any type of gay pride parades at my college, LGBT was more of a subtle thing.

There was no cure for HIV / AIDS in the early 1990’s, so sexually active college students were concerned about getting infected. Older gay men were dying from AIDS in the early 90’s, and then AZT became available and AIDS was no longer a death sentence. ALSO, more straight couples were worried about AIDS back in the 1990’s, it was later on that stats showed far higher tranmission rates in the gay community.

I sang in our university Chamber Choir and became friends with the gay and straight men in that choir, I asked them questions about their lifestyle, mainly because I didn’t understand how a man could be attracted to another man. I was so attracted to women that if there was a pretty lady in one of my classes I would only hear half of what the professor was teaching that day.

I think my campus experience was left leaning, I switched from a music major to economics, and there was more teaching about “the Chicago School” thinker Milton Friedman (left leaning) than thinkers like Ludwig Von Mises, a more right leaning economist.

In the 1990’s we were influenced by books, limited television, and conversations with our friends and family, there was no social media algorithm designed to divide and radicalize our viewpoints.

No “ragebait”, conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh were on the radio, but only if you dialed to his channel. Today your YouTube feed that will send you conservative commentators all day long if you fall down that rabbit hole. If you start watching Left Leaning YouTube videos you will get more content along those same lines.

The whole Charlie Kirk shooting is verification of some of the rage brewing out there, and social media magnifies that rage a thousandfold.

Of course, as Artificial Intelligence gets more advanced I’m afraid we will be influenced even MORE by very sophisticated video and media designed to influence our opinions. Kinda scary actually.

The AI won’t kill us, it will convince us to kill each other.

This is where we need to go back to real conversations, face to face, between people of different viewpoints.