What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet | Hacker News Reader

What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

qz.com

84 pointswyclif95 comments

I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything, and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap.

As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they were delayed, can't make it, in the wrong place, hit by a bus, etc. This is inconceivable to post-mobile people: of course you can just instantly contact anybody anywhere and figure out what's up!

It's interesting watching old sitcoms with episodes centered around that very issue. The trying to find a phone, the waiting, the misunderstandings. They all seem...odd now.

Or horror movies -- the killer has cut the phone lines! We can't call the police!

Now it's just, "oh, crap, we don't have any signal out here in pumpkin head holler."

Access to information has been a double edged sword as well.

I am one of the pre-internet oldies and recall how you had to go to the library, and find the book on the topic you wanted to research. It was a case of hoping it was there and not loaned out already, or too old an edition. Quite often, it would already be loaned out, and you had to wait a week or two and then go back, hoping it had been returned on time.

Experts back then, were really experts. There was a clear line between expert, hobbyist, and passing interest.

Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page.

If its a double edged sword, the positive edge is massive and sharp and very useful, and the negative edge of the sword is like a little needle, that perhaps provides a slight pain in the arse now and then. I remember before, and after is so much better.

The negative edge is what allows Donald Trump to be a viable candidate for President of the United States. It allows people with extreme views who before would have not had close contact with more than a handful of people with similar views (and then often only through inefficient means like a monthly newsletter and its letters column) to find each other and effectively organize in groups large enough to have an impact.

The same goes for the anti-vaccination folks, the "climate change is not real" folks, the anti-fluoridation folks, the anti-bike lane/trail and anti-public park people [1], and more.

[1] Yes, they are real. Bike lanes and public parks, they believe, are part of a UN agenda to make cities more attractive so that the population will concentrate in the cities, which will make it easier to impose martial law and confiscate guns. Before the internet this would have been a total joke. Now those people can organize, and show up in large groups at city council meetings considering parks and bike lanes, and get those projects killed.

Yeah, it's amazing how a tool that let's you find all the facts led to people finding all the facts they want and already believe and using that to further dig themselves into a hole that they believe is real.

Though it was easier to just control the masses with TVs and radios - they cant talk back, so you can spout whatever you want at them and they'll follow.

Pretty sure that Trump would've been just as popular today if the Internet was not around.

If the media liked him, he could have been a far more popular presidential candidate without the internet. In those places where the local press liked Trump, people would think he was the only viable candidate.

The internet has made people wiser and more savvy too. They've stopped one interest group from being able to make their views and messages seem like the only one.

Yes indeed. Libraries. Walking around the stacks looking for books in college and not necessarily knowing what would be in the book other than what was briefly described by the card catalog. You couldn't wikipedia a topic, so you had to really know how to scan a books contents and decide if it was worth the time to read. It was such a huge time commitment to learn anything at all from books back then. I love learning but I don't think that books/libraries were a better way to find information than the internet is. Every book should be digitized in my opinion.

Interestingly the internet (and computers in general) has made libraries better as well. I can search for pretty much any book using my local library's website, click a button and have it available within a few days for pickup at my local branch. The library will send me email reminders and will auto-renew books a number of times when they are about to come due.

We had bibliographies and reviews even before the internet. Back then you filled in your interlibrary loan request, the library would sent it out to its correspondence libraries, and only within a few days the postcard would come, telling you that your book was available for pickup.

That said, bibliographic databases have been around since computers. They were just restricted to librarians, mostly because of infrastructure issues.

Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page.

I think today's self-proclaimed informed authority compares pretty well to yesterday's hobbyists, at least. Access to information today is just so much better than it used to be. I've got a passing interest in ancient history, and I own a number of books, but I'm hardly an expert. This morning I watched a YouTube video about the origins of cavalry and how long it took after the domestication of horses before anyone tried riding into battle on the backs of the horses. Chariots, on the other hand, were widely used much earlier. Just from that 20 minute video I learned a lot about an important part of history, and I know that if I wanted to I could spend a few hours, right from home, learning far more about it than I could have gotten from days or weeks of research in libraries when I was growing up.

Lindybeige is a fantastic explainer when it comes to that sort of thing - it also highlights how quickly a person can go from knowing nothing to practically hobbyist levels of knowledge in 20 minutes post internet

I was wondering if anyone would catch the reference :)

Scott Adams - creator of Dilbert - was recently ridiculed for suggesting that someone could become an expert on a topic after an hour of talking with the brightest minds in that field. While "expert" needs to be defined, I don't think it's far fetched.

How many times have we had that conversation with someone who knows their topic backwards and forwards and after minutes, we have a deeper understanding of it than almost anyone around. Expand that out to an hour with a few key/relevant questions to frame the conversation and it is totally believable.

I recently attended a lecture by Hadley Wickham on his latest tools built for R. It was both edifying and deeply saddening. I learned a great deal about R in a short time from (IMHO) one of the masters, and I realized that if Haldey is typical of a Rice University professor I should have challenged myself to get a better education than I did.

As an aside, if you're interested in history and you don't yet follow Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, you're really missing out. He's great at finding sources, his historiography is sound and just heterodox enough to be appealing, and the man can tell a story like nobody's business - definitely worth the time of anyone with an interest in the subject.

One of the goals of technology is to increase the speed of knowledge transfer. So someone today can get to "expert" level of knowledge in a subject in a fraction of the time that it would have taken three decades ago. That's a good thing.

I read Umberto Eco's guide to writing an academic thesis in early 00's; I'm too young to have first-hand experience how people did academic research before internet, but the book was from late 1970s, and the description of importance of using bibliographies and other such sources and indexes was intriguing.

I thought it was a useful source for Call of Cthulhu campaign set in 1920s, where investigators are supposed how to use libraries effectively.

Link to review of English translation: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis

And oh, I recently tried starting a habit of keeping an up-to-date directory of greppable markdown notes with links to the papers and books I've read, directly inspired by Eco's index card system and his gigantic private library.

People used to turn up on time a lot more often in those days.

True. We were unable to reset expectations on the fly and had to meet our original commitment. Interesting observation.

This observation is anecdotal, IMHO. I very clearly remember waiting on people to show up on time before the Internet, more often than not. There's a reason that "guy sitting on the bench waiting for his date" was a meme even before communication became easier.

Being one of those pre-internet era kids who started out with a C64, I don't think so. Not having a company and private mobile phone wouldn't change anything to me. I rarely use it and the company can call my cable phone at home when I'm not in the office (where mobiles don't work due to the architects fail). When I'm not at home and not in the office, I'm in the car where I'm forbidden by the employer to use any means to be able to use the phone. For safety reasons.

Without the internet, I wouldn't have a job at all. I needed internet before mobiles and I would need it afterwards too.

I don't even believe most of the people would carry around those chunky screens (got one of those huge Lumia things as a company phone...ridiculous) with them without being able to access internet with it.

Sure being reachable is important but not as important as not having the internet. We managed without mobiles and we still manage when the batteries die.

I doubt your skills are so specific to the internet that you would be unemployable in a universe without it.

A brave doubt on hn.

Says the guy whose company is so specific to the Internet that it wouldn't exist in a world without one.

Not that I don't see what you're saying, but there are a lot of us out here who've built careers around the Internet which are, at the very least, far better than any other prospect that might've been available to us. Certainly in my own case - absent the Internet, I'm nothing but a mouthy unlettered redneck with no meaningful prospects beyond maybe doing menial lab work for the local university, earning maybe $10k a year over the local median in exchange for a lifetime of daily health risks and all the nonsense that goes with being staff in an academic environment.

Don't get me wrong - I'm still a mouthy unlettered redneck, either way. But in a world where the Internet is a thing, I'm a mouthy unlettered redneck who is unaccountably able to earn a very good living for himself, enough so that he can not only support himself in comfortable style but help look after family back home who weren't so fortunate, including the distant cousin who nearly died when his meth lab blew up.

So while I'm not wholly unsympathetic to commentary like the Quartz author's, I find myself forced to take it with a grain of salt. Sure, the current situation is not ideal. There are a lot of things that could change for the better. Healthier habits around mobile devices. A more conscious understanding of the effect the Internet has on perception. Facebook burned to the ground, the ground salted, and the ashes buried under a crossroads at midnight. All kinds of things.

There are also a lot of people out here like me for whom life in a world with even the Internet we have is vastly better than the best lives we'd be able to make for ourselves in a world without. I think that's something worth keeping in mind in a conversation like this. But then, of course, I suppose I'd almost have to think so, wouldn't I?

I think you got the original article wrong. The author didn't argue against the connected life. He observed that the people who know life without the internet are starting to go extinct, and argues that we should preserve the unconnected experience by going offline for a few days every so often.

As well to say we should "preserve the pre-electrification experience" by tripping the house main breaker for a few days every so often. Or that we should preserve the "pre-air-conditioning experience" by turning that off for a while. (I actually read such an article not long ago, in case that sounds too absurd to be borne. Cite on request.)

The past is a foreign country. It is also dead. To study it has value. To pretend oneself a tourist there has not.

The business I'm in is media. It's been around before the internet.

True; on further examination I see you publish trade news, and there is nothing uniquely Internet-dependent about that. You'd have needed much greater capital investment to do so without it and would probably be less profitable for the same revenue, but those aren't the points I made in my initial cavil, which I now gather was unjustified. Fortunately, said cavil is also severable.

Its funny how many 90's sitcom episodes were based on this exact premise - the uncertainty of someone's location, not being able to contact them, etc. It was a major problem back in the day.

A major problem it wasn't. We could not care less about it. If anything, it was just how things were. We tool it for granted, and we didn't have much difficulty with it.

A major movie/sitcom trope, yes.

I definitely remember using the phone at the bar I used to hang out at to call home to check my messages on my answering machine to find out where everyone else was planning to be. Or just walking around to familiar places to see if anyone was around. Life was a ton better living that way honestly. People were certainly more real. Now whenever I am around people I find they are compulsively checking their phones for messages and barely present in the moment at all. It's like... now everyone is always somewhere else. Another weird thing about cell phones is that in the pre-cell phone pre-internet era people did not take very many pictures of themselves and taking pictures at a party was kind of a special thing but certainly not the focus of everyone's activity all the time the way it seems to be now. I think it was more fun to just take pictures every once in a while and then have that interesting experience of getting film developed to find out how the pictures turned out. Memories stuck more then.

Similarly i recall my mom using a payphone at some diner during a summer trip to call the grandparents back home.

Then some years latter dad got a mobile phone (a brick of a Nokia) that was used sparingly for the same task.

Yeah the picture thing frustrates me, my parents used to have a photo drawer and albums with all the important stuff, now its just facebook.

I remember her talking about them as if they were the one thing she would save in a fire, but I doubt she has ever looked at an old facebook photo more than once.

I scanned a lot of my parent's old photos. I set my mom's screensaver to show them. It's one of her favorite things about the computer.

Which I guess I don't have much of a further point, but a random slideshow pulled from hundreds of events (the screen saver I setup does the random per folder) is sort of a thing that wouldn't work without the photos being digital.

That might feel a little different, and surely is convenient and in some cases even essential. I feel the difference in penetration is just because it's easier to provide mobile phone access than it is to provide broadband/wired connection. Of the people that don't have internet, I bet they don't have landlines or broadband TV either.

Mobile phones are just incomparable to the advances the internet has brought. The internet put the whole world into high speed mode.

When mobile phones started coming out, they were just something rich people spent too much money on. Most people I know bought their first mobile phone when it became less than $200. When the internet became accessible on mobile phones (and I mean really accessible, not just loading slow terrible UX websites on nerdy HTC Windows Phone palmtops like I had), suddenly even the middle class spent upwards of $800 on their phones.

That to me signals how important they feel it is to be connected, not just one to one, but to the entire net. The smartphone is a device that connects you to the internet in a convenient manner, that it's a mobile phone is secondary to that from my perspective.

I had access to the Internet long before I got a mobile phone, and it was fascinating, but it didn't rock my world in the same way. This was the Internet before HTTP, browsers and search engines: email was store-and-forward via UUCP (look it up), files were stored in FTP, indexing was via Gopher, and access to it all was via pay-per-minute long distance dial up to girlfriend's mom's account at a VAX box at a university using, erm, borrowed credentials. Using the trusty old card index at the local library was both faster and had much higher bandwidth, and things only really started to change when Mosaic and Alta Vista arrived on the scene.

I agree that smartphones are another revolution of comparable magnitude, but that started less than ten years ago: we don't even have a first fully-grown up post-smartphone generation yet.

My experience was a bit different. The local university had open-access dial-in numbers, from which you could telenet anywhere, use FTP, Gopher, IRC, Usenet, Archie, Veronica, WAIS, MUDs, email lists, dialout to BBSes, etc. We had lots of informational (and opinion) content, search, newsfeeds with comments, games, chat, and socialization. The main things we didn't have much of were e-commerce, ads, and images/audio/video. My career, many of my hobbies, and lifelong relationships came from that early internet. So it was a life-changer for me.

Mobile phones, on the other hand, didn't change much. Before them, we used the ubiquitous payphones when needed. Beepers briefly became a fad, but that faded out even before mobile phones became common; most people just didn't need constant telephone availability.

I bought a Motorola StarTAC in 1996 (?) for $700 but nobody else I knew had a cellphone expect my uncle.

So to impress a girl I made my PC dial me to ring my phone but it was the Fax app! I had to step away because I was afraid she'd hear the squeal of the Fax eeeeee!

One time probably mid 80s my uncle had a brick cellphone but was embarrassed to use it. At a Kmart entrance he went to the corner leaned on the wall with his back to everyone while he talked. As he was on the phone a little old lady was getting change from her purse. My uncle finished his call and left shocking the lady who thought there was a payphone on the wall.

Phones are important but without the internet they are just phones. Even with GPS, you would have to carry the whole world (or a significant amount of it where you live) as a map within your phone. Early pre-"Smart Phone" PDAs did exactly that (with external GPS receiver).

Information wise, Google changed everything. There was a before, where you the information was there, but you couldn't find it and an after, where almost every information you want is easily reachable.

Wikipedia is also an important milestone, but without proper search (just compare the internal search to Google) it would be a fraction useful.

That's kind of like saying phones are important, but without electricity they'd just be aluminum bricks.

Isn't that the point? If phone's are significantly less useful without the internet, then doesn't that mean that the internet is the more transformational technology?

I do exactly that. My phone has no data plan. I download the local area in Google Maps app when I'm on wifi, then I can use it for navigation without a data connection.

I personally do not find the cost of a data plan to be worth it. For anything urgent there's SMS or voice calls. Everything else can wait until I can get on wifi, which is really not much of a hurdle, any hotel lobby, coffee shop, etc. will have it.

Most of the rest of the world seems to go the other way: voice calls are rare and reserved for emergencies, SMS has been replaced by WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE and the like, and a data-only phone would be much more useful to most than a voice only device.

I agree, Google is important milestone. After Google you cannot have the original Internet experience. And if Gopgle hides something, you will never find that out.

> Information wise, Google changed everything.

Better to say "Search engines." A huge chunk of that change was already well underway before Google--as a specific product and company--came onto the scene.

I have to agree with you on that one. Phones did change our lives in a day but internet was like a whole new world for me. It's nice to know you can find literally anything of your interest in just 2 seconds. If people used it more for exchanging and sharing knowledge rather than boosting their ego with social media the world would be so much better.

Curious to know if the parent poster was alive before the internet was available to consumers?

It's hard to get over just how isolated information was before the internet. If you missed a sports score, for example, unless you heard the result fortuitously, you had to wait and read it in the newspaper the next day. CAN YOU IMAGINE?

If you wanted to know something relatively obscure, you had to travel to a library and look it up in a dozen books. Sure, phones provide an additional sort of last mile for that sort of thing, but the difference before and after the internet is almost impossible to communicate.

Can you imagine "missing the news" on the TV?

Yes, I was, see another reply below. "The Internet" in the pre-Web form I first encountered it was quite different from what you describe, and close to useless at answering your questions.

Also, Teletext was a thing, and it solved the "missing news" problem pretty well, as did TV and radio.

Yeah admittedly in 1995 it didnt solve these problems either but by 2002 it had done...

>I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything,

I disagree somewhat and it's possible the disagreement depends on how we slice up the time ranges of "mobile phone" and "internet".

The "internet" divided into 2 periods:

pre- www internet: 1980s text based, Usenet, government and universities:

post- www internet: 1990s graphics on webpages, google, wikipedia, amazon

The "mobile phones" divided into 2 periods:

"dumb phones" pre 2007 of Motorola/Nokia

"smart phones" post 2007 in the iPhone/Android world

Thinking back to 2006, the internet changed daily life much more meaningfully than mobile phones. When I got the "dumb phone" in the 1990s that cost 70 cents a minute, it didn't change my daily life the way Google/Wikipedia/Amazon did. To this day, I probably do 20+ queries on google.com every single day. I hardly interact with my iPhone and I don't install apps on it. In 1998, I remember booking a plane ticket online (the fancy new "e-ticket") from Southwest Airlines and it seemed magical when the gate agent let me board the plane even though I hadn't spoken to a single human being. I'd agree that pre-1990s internet of dialing up into BBS's and chatting on Usenet felt more like a toy than a necessity of life.

I'm guessing the folks favoring "mobile phones" as more life-changing than the internet are thinking of post-2007 smartphones. (But I'd argue part of what makes smartphones "smart" is the internet.)

If society were forced to choose, I'm confident most would rather have full internet with no mobile phones rather than 100% mobile phone coverage and zero internet infrastructure. Since both technologies grew up together, we can only entertain though experiments about which technology is more meaningful to humanity.

Mobile phones allow you to connect with your tribe. The Internet allows you to connect with the entire species.

The modest throughput and memory capacity of individuum cannot describe capacity of connection with the entire species. I am not even speaking about linguistical barriers.

> This is one of those technologies that changes everything

Another technology with wide impact is the digital camera, which appeared after 2000, and spread in any and all devices today. We will remember the world since the digital camera in a very different way than before. I have a pittance of analog photos, but over 100K digital ones.

People tend to remember only what they photograph. In a few years, we will only remember what we shot pictures of. We tend to lock in those moments to the exclusion of the rest. Along with the internet, I'd say cameras are also a huge influence society.

I think it's good to remember the nice things about pre-internet and try to protect them/bring them back.

But the internet has one very important job: Allow us to prevent global climate catastrophe. It would be impossible without the internet. Only by integrating all of our cultures together into one giant knot, and having armies of people coordinating together in loose federation can we implement the myriad social, architectural, and cultural changes that we need to do in order to prevent a major environmental calamity from becoming an ecosystem-leveling tragedy.

That sounds very grandiose, and perhaps I'm out of touch, but I'm not really pumping it up for rhetorical effect. That's a pretty flat representation of what I actually believe we are facing.

There's no global climate catastrophe.

Not yet.

Read the title: AWWW

Read this comment: DOH...

We have already crossed the point of no return. At the rate humanity is going it will take at least 20 years to stop increasing our carbon footprint let alone stop or reverse it. And most of the climate studies have been wrong not that there is no climate change instead most studies have been too conservative the rate of change is a lot faster.

I am unconvinced that integrating all cultures into a giant knot is good for the environment, scientific progress, or human equality.

I share your skepticism, but my working hypothesis is that it will help. That said, fear of it going wrong does keep me up at night.

One thing that the internet has removed is the endless debates / discussions / disagreements between friends and family about different facts. We just now google the facts and the argument is over as soon as it starts.

I wish. Instead, we spend our time arguing over the qualifications of the differing sources found via Google. "But he has a doctorate too!"

Facts are, ironically, getting harder to find and verify these days.

I'd say, we up the difficulty of our discussions. Things we would discuss in the past (e.g. which year was XYZ born) are now settled beyond dispute with a quick google. Now we are stuck discussing questions that cannot be resolved this way.

But now everyone has his own facts, that they can back up with authoritative sources like Breitbart or @GlobalWarmingLie.

I remember writing and receiving letters. I lived in a reasonably small rural town and from time to time would meet a girl from the next town along, or if I was truly fortunate even further afield.

I used to "go for a walk" many evenings and drop coins into the pay phone around the corner to talk to these people. Or, arrive home from school with the greatest expectation if I thought there might be a letter waiting for me. I think there is still a drawer full of these teenage missives in my mother's house.

I left home at 18 and travelled to the other side of the world for a year. This was 1992. No mobile phones and certainly no consumer Internet to speak of. I'd call my family maybe once a month and I think I wrote about a dozen letters the whole time. After returning to my birth country, for the next 12 months I think I wrote even more letters to those I'd met abroad.

By 1994 I was running up massive phone bills connecting to BBSs on a 2400 baud modem.

I remember the first graphic I ever downloaded from the Internet was a picture of the Louvre. I used Slipknot.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_%28web_browser%29

Mobile phones gave us information about our friends right now.

The internet gave us information about everything, across all time and all places (barring the disconnected and undiscovered.) And that includes all information about our friends that they share. Often it's what they are doing in the moment, with hints about who they are, how they live, what they believe and enjoy.

Before the internet, all of this information was an infrequent but novel discovery. Often, it was personal and unique. Now, the world is homogenized, and discovery is constant, but trivial.

Was born in 1969. Had a computer since I was 13. At 21, got an Internet account from my uni and I've been online since. It's sometimes difficult to remember pre-Internet since being networked has been part of essentially my entire adult life. Playing a MUD based in Germany. Chatting up girls from Taiwan and France. Getting into pointless arguments with people from everywhere. Using an "app store" (FTP) for the majority of the software on my old Mac LC. Even before the WWW revolution, using FTP, gopher, and usenet archives to get tons of information on random subjects. As early as 2001, I was receiving and responding to email on my little (and overly expensive but it had a color screen!) Samsung flip phone using an app. I remember helping put out a fire at work while I was drunk on vacation by tapping out instructions slowly using T9.

Everything since then has felt evolutionary to me, instead of revolutionary, which is a personal blindness from being so long exposed.

But there's one memory, which is funny to me, that illustrates how much social interaction has changed. In 1999, was sitting with a bunch of friends at a bar. We were usually a talkative group but this night everyone was being a little sullen and quiet. Since no one was doing anything, I pulled out my Palm III and started reading some article AvantGo had downloaded. Everyone else at the table started staring at me and looked a little horrified. My best friend gently took it out of my hand, folded the cover shut, and slipped it back into my pockets. And I never did it again, at least not for a couple of years. By late 2001, my little flip phone had a J2ME text-only browser and I'd read Slashdot on the slow bar nights. By then, it wasn't bothering anyone.

As a pre-1985 person I think the worst part of the Internet is the know-it-all culture it created.

Especially with smartphones with Internet people seem to consider themselves experts in everything. If the topic isn't on the Internet or if the user can't find it then it must not exist or you get a terse request "Source!".

The worst part is I get drawn into the culture we all do or most of us anyway. I used to be good at trivia, I could often quote obscure scientific discoveries and was aware of world events as a teenager. Now all that has become a mindless app aka web browser no need to know just click.

Although the early Internet the early 1990s was a great time normal regular people from around the world conversing in large groups in real time for the first time ever.

I think this paradigm shift is extremely important. All that brain space that was allocated to trivia or knowledge is now going to be allocated to meta trivia/knowledge. Tidbits about how to discover more information/knowledge. This is fantastically powerful.

I was reflecting on this the other day. How do we communicate now? What are the key features of how we communicate that were not available before. Maybe it's the combination of the following.

1. Written, using language++ (by this I mean we communicate primarily by conventional writing, enhanced with emoticons, photos, audio clips).

2. Lightweight (it's no effort to write).

3. Concurrent (multiple communication going on in at the same time).

4. Persistent and context preserving (meaning, if you come back to the communication later today, tomorrow, in a week, in a year, it's still there)

5. Searchable.

6. Immediate, yet synchronous (meaning, your messages arrive instantly, but (and this is a social convention) you don't have to reply directly if you don't want to hence you have time to think).

7. Mediated (meaning: not face-to-face; although a weak form of face-to-face is available via video).

9. Global (meaning that there are no geographic restrictions as to whom we communicate with).

This is a fairly dramatic change.

To give but one example of how dramatic a change this is, let's look at something this new form of communication has changed quite a bit: courtship. In the past one typically courted only one person at a time, or maybe 2-3 if adventurous. Aided by social media in general and platforms like Grindr/Tinder in particular, it's now possible to court large numbers of (potential) partners at the same time, dozens, quite possibly hundreds. Some even automate parts of their courtship process: chat-bots, A/B testing of photos and openers, GPS spoofing to target specific geographic locations (e.g. for pipelining before travelling).

Courtship isn't quite the word I'd use for Grindr.

On you first two points, I agree. I don't think the effect of the Internet on reading and writing can be exaggerated.

Pre-Internet, the only writing I ever did was when encouraged by parents (such as to penpals I didn't really want anyway) or for schoolwork. I suspect this would have been true for most. And written English was a more formal mode of the language that barely reflected day to day conversations at all.

Now, the amount of reading and writing that almost all of us are doing on a daily basis is staggering. In this comment alone I've "written" more than I'd have written for entertainment in most years of my childhood. Informal, day to day language is now fine in writing, a whole new slang culture has appeared, and everyone is sharing their thoughts more directly in a way we could have never anticipated (for good and bad) - it's excellent and I'm so glad I got to see it happen.

Yes, I agree, the shift from reading to writing is pronounced, and probably profound.

After the Internet went mainstream, for the first time in history, large number of people write every day, people who wouldn't have, in comparable social station, have written in the past. Who wrote in the past? Pupils, students, lawyers and some other professionals. Most, would have stopped writing prose after finishing school or university. Moreover, very few would have written voluntarily, only as part of a job, or as part of education. For the majority of the population, all voluntary, fun, hedonic communication (in the narrow, everyday sense) was spoken. This is now very different.

I used to think that writing makes us smarter (because it asks us to think carefully, to look at the writing from many perspectives, to try and produce truth, since writing is preserved and likely seen by others), and so had high hopes for humanity ...

... then came Twitter ... and I realised that it's not writing as such that has these effects, but rather social expectations (as for example embodied in the career structure of scientists) in concert with writing that account for those positive effects.

Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I really miss having places people would congregate, a common hangout spot, specifically because you didn't have 24/7 tabs on where all your friends were. Wherever it was-- a bar or park or wherever, you could always breeze by and find a few people there. Now everybody's so divided, pinging "favourite" folks to hang out (I'm guilty of it too)... but it takes away that window to get to know some peripheral friend that you might get "stuck" with at the park with and find out they've got loads of neat stories or fun ideas or whatever.

And I truly hate people looking at their phones during parties. If you're that bored just go start another conversation with somebody else, christallmighty :\

I can imagine somebody in the 1400s talking about being the last generation to remember life before books, and what a freeing time it was where people actually had to talk with each other to get information.

That issue already came up in Platon's Phaedrus. The issue that is brought up is that reading about a subject is not the same as immersion brought about by interaction with that subject. It brings about an illusion of learning. Says Platon.

Sound familiar, no?

http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/482...

I think Platos/Socrates point holds still. You can read exactly how to build a house having never built one and "know" how to build a house. There is a vast difference between that and actually whats learned while building a house.

I have learned a lot by reading but it always pales to what I learned from doing.

I would trust the person more who built ten houses compared to a person who read every word written about building them but never built one.

You see the effect every year, with students attempting the transition from teaching labs to actual research. In research you have to step back and use your knowledge in unfamiliar context. It is a big jump.

Or the Egyptian King Thamus.

We do not speak of the Before-time here.

Coming from the perspective of an excited child computer hobbyist in the 1980s and seeing it go mainstream (bigger than anticipated), alot of feelings, both positive and negative. Negative for instance the weaponization and corporate control. But -- overall more positive than negative.

What's funny to me though, we used to have this term "killer app". The specific app that made a platform blow-up..

Well, if you remember the 90s, the killer app for the Internet (we used to use capital I, too by the way) was porn. Clearly.. Porn. That always makes me smile when people get a little too carried away about the net's importance in the world.

Interesting how the year 1985 (or there abouts from what I've seen) is regarded as truly "pre-internet." I've always felt like I was relatively delayed getting online (born in the early 90s and first remember googling something in about 98-99 so I would have been about 6.) I suppose that has something to do with age and the fact that I was living in a country without widespread connection, but the www was well established by that point so I'm surprised. Anyone else in their early 20s feel like they remember the "pre-internet" days?

For the benefit of younger generations, here's everything you need to know about the pre-internet era:

You didn't miss anything. Everything was strictly worse. Much, much worse. It makes me shudder to even think about any of it. Count yourselves lucky that you didn't have to live through those dark ages.

If you ever feel the urge say something like "but the internet gave us mass surveillance", just stop and think wether you would really complain about hospital waiting times to someone who had to have surgery before the invention of anesthetics ;-)

>If you ever feel the urge say something like "but the internet gave us mass surveillance", just stop and think wether you would really complain about hospital waiting times to someone who had to have surgery before the invention of anesthetics

...I'm sorry, I don't understand how that parable is supposed to make sense.

That analogy is stupid. We are only slowly beginning to grasp the full gravity of mass surveillance.

It wasn't "much worse".

Some things were more inconvenient, but other things were simpler.

Wow, that was a downer to read and I'm sorry you feel that way. I feel much different.

In fact, some of my best memories and seemingly happiest times were my pre-teen through post teen years through the 80's and early 90's. Without internet but was still immersed in the geeky stuff. Simpler times as the cliché would say.

Things like seeing what my friends were up to actually involved a sense of more freedom and independence because you had to actually get on your bike and knock on their door as your parents told you to stay off the phone (that cost like .3/minute to call a block away). The only "tech" that interfered with our lives was in our homes. Parks, lazing around with friends, exploring, baseball.. etc. Whatever you could do to pass time and enjoy ones company. Driving my bike to nearest field to see who else was there and sharing baseball cards, stories, flirts, etc was our Facebook.

But this was also a time of exploring the exploding world of hobby electronics (Radio Shack, Popular Electronics, First IBM PC and DOS, etc) but was more hands-on physical rather than the post-internet software/webpage intangible is king. Like I said before it was all in your home and my house was the epi-center of this stuff in my neighborhood as I was the one known to have it. If not outside getting dirty, we'd be in my house playing Earl Weaver Baseball or NFL Challenge. A pittance compared to todays sports games graphics-oriented games as these were more numbers/strategy based.

I also remember once modems became affordable that there was actually an "online" world BEFORE the internet. BBS's, usenet.

I'd be interested to hear if he has also looked into any parallels with the pre- and post-telephone generation. I'd imagine that was a similar in many ways, particularly since public airplane transportation came of age in roughly the same era.

Still being born https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage

The title of the post itself sends shudders.

What does it feel like?

It feels like a blessing to have known what was and what is now. Certainly gives one perspective.

It feels like Wow

What was good before the Internet, we were a lot more ignorant, and that was a bliss.

You went to your doctor, and just did what he told you to do.

You just went to the mall, and bought a TV home without comparing prices on your mobile phone.

If you were lost on your car, well, you spent a little on gas until you found a way home.

You didn't need to pay for Spotify or Apple Music to discover new music, you just listened to music your friends at school lent you.

The reading the news wasn't that important, but journalism was a responsible thing.

No social network metrics pressure on kids.

There were these things called travel agencies. OMG.

etc.

Happens all the time. Since no optic fibre was found in fossil fuels, it seems The Internet dinosaurs used was all the way wireless. Regular glaciation events wiped out old interwebs once in 10-20 thousand years, and we are living close enough to the next glacial period. Use our stone calendars! These are more robust mecia.

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