Yesterday was a day spent on the sofa, still marginally recovering from the excesses of the Christmas holidays, and collecting my thoughts in advance of a new year. Through this combination of general laziness, we found ourselves watching an edition of the property show Location Location Location from the year 2000 on More4.
After picking myself up off the floor from conversations about buying one-bedroom flats in Hackney for around £100,000 (someone again remind me why house price inflation is such a good thing?), my focus started to drift to the ways in which technology has so dramatically changed so many of the things that we do in the past decade.
The younger (and considerably less camera-happy) Phil and Kirsty had mobile phones, and they used them to make telephone calls. They called the local authority to find out about planning permissions; they called the London Transport information line to find out about bus times; they phoned estate agents to find out about properties coming onto the market… no local government websites, no transport apps, no RightMove.com.
Not only that, but they also extolled the virtues of taking photos when viewing propeties, and then pulled out a Polaroid Instamatic to prove the point.
But there again, whilst Location Location Location felt dated, it was nothing on a bit of the old Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie You’ve Got Mail from two years earlier that I caught a few days before… the sound of modems and the sights of the AOL Login screen. Ahh, those were some days.
mmitII 