• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, February 21, 2025

I love New York.

I grew up two hours from the city and when I graduated from college, I moved there almost immediately.  It was 1995.  It was a magical time in the history of a city that has experienced many a magical time.  My specific time was marked by the crossroads of two important stages of media: the internet and print.  I am going to describe that time for the sake of those reading who were too young and missed that stage, because it was a simpler time and one that should be remembered.

Social media did not exist -- a very important component to remember.

We had the internet in its earliest days.  Most of my friends had email but it was tied to a desktop, sitting at home or at work.  We didn’t have cell phones.  We had pagers.  Cell phones came a few years later and my first one had a two-hour battery capacity, and about 30 minutes of talk time.  Once you left for the day, you had to know where you were going and who you were meeting.  If you planned a succession of locations, you created codes to page to your friends, so they knew where you were.  It was a rudimentary Morse code for those who knew it.  Those were our on-the-fly tools, but our preferred ways of knowing what to do and where to go were The Village Voice and TimeOut magazine. 

The Voice was most important.  Its newsprint pages that bled onto your fingers every time you thumbed through them opened up a world of possibilities. You would see what bands were playing which clubs, and at that time there were a lot of them to go see.  You had to coordinate the week with your friends, knowing who to go see on which night and planning around who could afford to hit which show.  You learned which clubs had back doors you could possibly sneak into.  An alley way here or there was always a good way to get in if you knew where to look. 

You could find the weekly special at your favorite bars, and maybe even toss in some culture with an art exhibit if you were so inclined. 

You read the articles to learn a point of view maybe you hadn’t expected, and that point of view fueled a conversation later in the week at one of those aforementioned bars.  Along the way you would meet new friends, change your plans on the fly, and possibly send a code to a friend’s pager to let them know the plan had changed. 

Our social media was a weekly magazine and newspaper distributed for free and available on every corner.  It was a tangible artifact of the week that you could keep handy  -- and you knew that if you were out, and you were looking for something to do, you could find one anywhere and discover something that spoke to you.  Those two publications, and especially The Voice, shaped an entire generation (if not more) as they found their way and became more grown-up versions of themselves.  There was no hatemongering in them, no angry diatribes of people trying to put others down.  It was social in a way that I wish social media online could still be. 

One can only hope that social media could become more like that old model -- a simpler, kinder, yet still helpful form of media.