Before There Was the ‘Like’ Button There Was the ‘Radiovota’
The Like button is older than you think. Well, sort of.
Back in the 1930s, Dr. Nevil Monroe Hopkins, a research engineer at NYU, had an idea: He wanted to allow consumers of the mass medium of the time—the radio—to offer feedback about the stuff they were hearing on their newfangled machines. He wanted people to be able to do what the average user of Facebook or Pandora or Instagram takes for granted today: to express pleasure at something. Or dissatisfaction, for that matter. Hopkins was looking for a way for people to vote about the stuff on their radios. Using their radios.
And thus was born … the “radiovota.”
Read more. [Image: Radio-Craft Magazine via Gizmodo]
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