Was quite young at the time but was how pervasive was this pagers are for drugs sentiment? I had never heard of it when hearing about people reminiscing about pagers.
Was quite young at the time but was how pervasive was this pagers are for drugs sentiment? I had never heard of it when hearing about people reminiscing about pagers.
I wasn't born until the early 90s, and wasn't really in the public school sphere, so the apparent scope of this (lawmakers, arrests, and an over the top moral panic) is worse than I was aware. I...
I wasn't born until the early 90s, and wasn't really in the public school sphere, so the apparent scope of this (lawmakers, arrests, and an over the top moral panic) is worse than I was aware. I definitely do remember people joking that younger people who had them were dealing drugs, and otherwise the association was that anyone with one was a doctor.
It's kind of funny, because now I'm a software engineer in an on-call rotation (though now we use a service that sends smartphone notifications instead of physical pagers) and people seem more...oblivious? If I say "I'm on-call" people seem assume it means "has to go to a customer service job to cover shifts" instead of "doctor or something." Not sure what to make of that.
The 80s had a few other crazy moral panics, like:
Rock is violence/drugs/etc, Part II (Tipper Gore and gang, with the ensuing congressional hearings and Crossfire debate). This was recycling the same sort of thing that happened in the 1950s when the first wave of rock was out.
People "knew" rap music caused drug use and violence, well into the 90s
Dungeons & Dragons = ritual summoning of demons +/- drug use
More 90s: the gory realism of Mortal Kombat and DOOM cause people to become unhinged and commit acts of violence. (Look at those obscene red pixels!) Also includes congressional hearings for seasoning.
It kind of feels like nothing changes. The same small-minded people waste society's collective mental bandwidth on the same dumb cycles of moral panic, playing Mad Libs a little with the specifics.
The only people I've encountered with beepers/pagers in my life (I was born after their heyday) have been doctors, so it seems very strange to me to associate them with anything else lol
The only people I've encountered with beepers/pagers in my life (I was born after their heyday) have been doctors, so it seems very strange to me to associate them with anything else lol
My stepdad told me he used to not have a phone just before I met him, he just had a beeper and we lived beside a hotel, he would go in and use their payphone
My stepdad told me he used to not have a phone just before I met him, he just had a beeper and we lived beside a hotel, he would go in and use their payphone
Was quite young at the time but was how pervasive was this pagers are for drugs sentiment? I had never heard of it when hearing about people reminiscing about pagers.
I wasn't born until the early 90s, and wasn't really in the public school sphere, so the apparent scope of this (lawmakers, arrests, and an over the top moral panic) is worse than I was aware. I definitely do remember people joking that younger people who had them were dealing drugs, and otherwise the association was that anyone with one was a doctor.
It's kind of funny, because now I'm a software engineer in an on-call rotation (though now we use a service that sends smartphone notifications instead of physical pagers) and people seem more...oblivious? If I say "I'm on-call" people seem assume it means "has to go to a customer service job to cover shifts" instead of "doctor or something." Not sure what to make of that.
The 80s had a few other crazy moral panics, like:
Rock is violence/drugs/etc, Part II (Tipper Gore and gang, with the ensuing congressional hearings and Crossfire debate). This was recycling the same sort of thing that happened in the 1950s when the first wave of rock was out.
General Satanic Panic...and if we want to get technical, a lot of that is uncomfortably close to Blood Libel.
People "knew" rap music caused drug use and violence, well into the 90s
Dungeons & Dragons = ritual summoning of demons +/- drug use
More 90s: the gory realism of Mortal Kombat and DOOM cause people to become unhinged and commit acts of violence. (Look at those obscene red pixels!) Also includes congressional hearings for seasoning.
It kind of feels like nothing changes. The same small-minded people waste society's collective mental bandwidth on the same dumb cycles of moral panic, playing Mad Libs a little with the specifics.
The only people I've encountered with beepers/pagers in my life (I was born after their heyday) have been doctors, so it seems very strange to me to associate them with anything else lol
My stepdad told me he used to not have a phone just before I met him, he just had a beeper and we lived beside a hotel, he would go in and use their payphone
Even though I'm 34, I had to google just now how pagers actually worked