as a working class kid growing up in a German village of 800 people I credit the internet for a lot of the stuff I learned. From coding, to learning English, to talking to people from other walks of life, and so on. That together with the fact that I could go to a good school with a healthy mix of people from other backgrounds I'd credit with 90% of what got me to university.
Today there's a lot of negative discourse about the internet and the post-truth world it creates, but people have to keep in mind on the other hand it had and has an incredibly liberating effect for a lot of people.
Same here, but from Slovenia, equally a small village.
I think people forget the incredibly huge role internet has in terms of openly available knowledge.
In my opinion the majority of negativity around internet is from the general public and about the websites that the general public uses aka. facebook, twitter, instagram, ...
This has became even more apparent when I started teaching computer science to students and adults. The most noticeable was their inability to use Google, actually being able to find information online.
Techy people quite often forget that, since we're so used to solving problems.
Imagine programming without internet... <insert stackoverflow joke here>
The fact that both of you could grow up in small, non English-speaking villages and write such beautiful English is a testament to the power of learning English through the internet. It's amazing how natural and clear non-native-speakers' English feels when they've learned it as they're interacting with the wealth of discourse on the internet. People who haven't learned foreign languages (looking at you, fellow North Americans) won't quite appreciate what a huge achievement this is. (To be able to write and communicate freely in a way that feels native.)
Also the same here - I'm from a little village (~2000 people) in the Czech Republic.
I remember how (thanks to the internet) in the late 90's, I started listening to English music and playing video games without knowing any English.
A few years forward I had much better English than all of my classmates, but without putting any work in.
Then, I learned Spanish also online and moved to the Central America.
Anyway, I still wonder if my old classmates aren't better off in that small village since they don't really know about the huge and complicated world that's outside of their country. Having a few friends that live a few hundred meters from your house and working as a plumber seems liberating in a way.
Today there's a lot of negative discourse about the internet and the post-truth world it creates, but people have to keep in mind on the other hand it had and has an incredibly liberating effect for a lot of people.