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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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.

>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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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