H G Cocks, Classified: the secret history of the personal column (2009)
I picked up a copy of this, which has only been out a couple of months (I linked to this review in Feb), for under £3.00, as far as I can tell brand new, from the Oxfam Bookshop in Kentish Town. Score.
Okay, it's being put out by a trade publisher, and the footnoting and citation leaves a bit to be desired, even if I do get namechecked a couple of times, but Cocks is srs historian and it's based on (I suspect) offcuts from his research on cultures of courtship in the early C20th, nicely packaged for a general market.
I mark it down for the gratuitous and pointless use of the term 'secret history' - uninvestigated is not the same as secret, people! - but that is probably an editorial/marketing decision.
It's not at all bad. A bit slight, a bit generalise-y about deeper context, a bit simplistic in characterising various decades (and it does rather do conventional periodisation, but that's still one way to slice up the data, after all), but he's dug up some interesting stuff, it's an easy read, it's got nice vignettes and anecdotes and there's even some analysis (a bit on the 'lite' side perhaps, but it is there, this isn't just one of those 'look at funny stuff about Teh Past and how weird people usterbe' books on neglected social phenomena).
And I am all for a book which lets people know that virtual relationships, or at least relationships not mediated within pre-existing f2f communities and social networks, have a much longer history than people think and are not just a product of the internet. And that a lot of the anxieties about them go back pretty much to the beginning.
It's possibly a bit let down by the final chapter on the world of Web 2.0, which does not read like something written by someone who engages in online social interaction to any great degree, so comes out with some bog-standard generalisations on the subject. (I really think he over-estimates the extent to which people are really, rather than apparently, self-revelatory.) I also feel that he could have pushed the investigations into 70s swinging in the UK a bit further - wot no Forum magazine? Will concede that perhaps pursuing oral history with members of that subculture, who must still be around (I think my erstwhile colleague The 70s Swinger, who used to regale us with anecdotes of his experiences, though recently retired is still about and probably available for reminiscence) was probably a bit beyond the parameters of a popular history like this unless one already had the material on hand. Ditto people who met via ads or introduction services pre-internet...
But on the whole this is an easy and enjoyable and informative read. It may be on the slight side (there are probably deeper and fuller studies that could be written), but it doesn't, on the whole, get things wrong and I was not gnashing my teeth.