
What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet - wyclif
http://qz.com/252456/what-it-feels-like-to-be-the-last-generation-to-remember-life-before-the-internet/
======
jpatokal
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!

~~~
nul_byte
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.

~~~
DougWebb
_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.

~~~
dreeko_
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

~~~
caseysoftware
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.

~~~
technofiend
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.

------
erikpukinskis
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.

~~~
fleevy
There's no global climate catastrophe.

~~~
kaybe
Not yet.

------
kyriakos
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.

~~~
falcolas
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.

~~~
mafribe
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.

------
phillc73
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_%28web_browser%29)

------
neogodless
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.

------
LarbarBarking
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.

------
mafribe
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).

~~~
petercooper
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.

~~~
mafribe
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.

------
neverknowsbest
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
:\

------
dghughes
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.

~~~
jobigoud
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.

------
danielrhodes
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.

~~~
HarryHirsch
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...](http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/482/482readings/phaedrus.html)

~~~
Mendenhall
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.

~~~
HarryHirsch
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.

------
dpweb
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.

------
herzogshoe
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?

------
fauigerzigerk
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 ;-)

~~~
maus42
>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.

------
NEDM64
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.

------
jayvanguard
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.

------
mlinksva
Still being born
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage)

------
socmag
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

------
ommunist
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.

------
sevenless
We _do not speak_ of the Before-time here.

