At the top of the Netflix chart for a few days there is a series that talks about the Internet. It’s not about a scary future like Black Mirror, it’s not a thriller like Mr Robot. It speaks of a recent and yet very distant past, just over twenty years ago, 1998. It tells of how we were at the dawn of the web when there were not yet Google and Wikipedia and obviously not even Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Whatsapp. When to connect to the network, the few who did, did it using a modem that went very slow, at 56k. Generation 56k, this is the name of the TV series, is a techno-romantic comedy, like the film There is a mail for you, which dates back to 1998 and was centered around our use of emails. But that, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, was set in a big American city, the Internet was already everywhere (slow, but there was), here it was a rarity.
Generation 56K, signed by the production company Cattleya with The Jackal, this rarity tells it very well. The fact that in a Campania island there is only one user of the network; the wait when a small world appeared on the computer screen and saw a cursor filling up as the connection was completed with a prolonged sound that seemed to come from hyperspace; and the sense of wonder discovering that inside you can find all the information you want. Films then weren’t streaming but on VHS cassettes, and music on compact discs; and I believe that thanks to this series our children understand for the first time what these strange objects were used for, which still collect dust in our home libraries.
Generation 56k is not a nostalgic product but you can warn a bit of magone if you think that in those years in Italy we were not really that far behind: there were companies such as Videonline, Tiscali, I.Net, Dada that understood that everything was changing . We had even developed a search engine, Arianna, two years before Google, and someone was trying to launch a social network when the word didn’t exist yet. And then? Then we didn’t believe it enough. And we stayed at 56k.
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