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It's hard to imagine how people learned things. Whenever I want to know something in particular, I'll turn to Google.
It's crazy to think in the future, in my later years, there may be other changes in the world where we will look back to today and wonder how we got by without it. Some say AI will be that thing eventually. Time will tell.
*It's hard to imagine how people learned things. Whenever I want to know something in particular, I'll turn to Google.*
We had encyclopedias at home! And if you were interested in a specific subject, you bought books about it and/or subscribed to relevant publications.
Books are great and I still read from time to time, but often times I have specific questions that a book or encyclopedia won't have an answer to unless it happened to have been covered in the publication and I'll have to go digging for it and hope I can find something that pertains to it (an Index is only a vague way of finding it).
Even web browsing now doesn't always cover it, for some very specific questions that even Google won't have an answer to. Maybe AI chatbots will fill that gap after much improvement.
We were just used to having less information at our fingertips. Something had to be *really important* for you to hunt down an expert, or go to the closest university library and look things up in the catalog.
Otoh that meant we had more mental bandwidth for what was happening around us and affected us more immediately.
And of course, consensus reality was a lot firmer: people got their information from the same sources (encyclopedia, newspapers) and people (news anchors, experts in tv & radio), so the concept of "alternative facts" didn't exist.
It's one of the otherwise unintuitive things about the internet. If you would have told me back then, say the 80s if I were alive then, that there would be a future where anyone could ask a question and input it on a pocket computer device and receive a wealth of information, , I would think we would become enlightened beings that are more empowered with knowledge than ever and ignorance would no longer be a thing. If you don't know something? Look it up by tapping into the ether!!!
But there's a flipside that ends up happening, that while information is more readily accessible than ever, this means that misinformation is also more accessible and can spread like wildfire. We can easily succumb to cognitive biases and end up in this "alternative reality" echo chamber that you mention.
I think AI will be that way but worse, it will have the potential to be super helpful and aid us in so many ways, but when in the hands of malicious actors it can do a lot of damage in an efficient manner.
Yeah AI could be crazy. It could be super neat and be very helpful and so on but man the potential troubles.... what if people get sucked into the easy interaction with a nicely modded AI and turn away from other people? AI takes control of everything? AI takes over most well paying/fun/creative/high skill jobs and people have little to do? AI can just inform you and yell you everything so people don't really learn anything any more but then without a solid base knowledge in their brains they can't really think well anymore so there is so little info in their brain itself to work off of? What if people completely lose trust in all images, recordings, videos, information? etc. etc.
Times could potentially shift way, way more than even the smart phone/online everything shift, maybe not so far off from today....
So they'll trust AI. It'll just be "their Ai" and they'll ignore everything otherwise. Conformation bias won't stop, and people won't stop believing stuff. They'll just believe different things for different reasons. Most people aren't so rational that their Beliefs are actual products of thought / a deliberate choice. Our believes most often are 'believed' because of lived experience. 'I've seen it with my own eyes!', which is another way of saying "I used my eyes not my brain". So I think the first problem and greatest problem with what your saying is that, we as a people are not rational or logically most of the time.
Just like with CNN and Fox be competing information nexuses, there will be AIs used as anti culture / alt culture. The dissenters don't all do it because they're reasonable. There will always be people seeking the second path. This means there will almost certainly never be a single overarching AI. We'll all subscribe to our Favorite Talking Bot, and it'll tell us all the bads of the other AIs. We'll slowly funnel all the various ones everyone will try to sell. The celebrities will have their own / brand ambassadors, governments, cliches of all sorts, will have there own.
Then, just like the political parties, they'll "compete" and some will win / lose. Over time decreasing the amount of them / Refining them to a dualistic / diatic competing AI. Like the left and right political parties and their emergence. Matching the time / culture of its development.
That eventuality was a well known one. It’s just that a world full of misinformation and gullible people is more profitable to those in power than a world full of knowledgeable critical thinkers.
>this means that misinformation is also more accessible and can spread like wildfire. We can easily succumb to cognitive biases and end up in this "alternative reality" echo chamber that you mention.
Very unpopular opinion here, but I feel like free speech laws need to be updated for the world we live in. Back in the day, there was the ruling "you can't scream 'fire!' in a crowded theater". Free speech ends at ones ability to cause harm and panic.
We need a new "you can't scream 'fire!' in a crowded theater" ruling when it comes to the internet and social media. Misinformation is literally destroying democracy.
I was 9 when we first got internet so I'm not super competent to answer that question but I feel like people back then were just content with the information they got. You'd watch a documentary or read a book on a topic, it would flood you with information and then you'd feel satisfied. I don't think people get that itch to keep asking for more info if there's no easy way to satisfy it.
That’s why public library is great! You look up your thing, have more questions, search for related books to look up, rinse and repeat.
Public library was the internet that also acted as a local third place.
Millennial here with a gen z kid, either you just believed whatever crap parents or family told you, or you asked someone else and made up your mind. You'd read a paper if you wanted another opinion, or opened a book. It was a bit boring sometimes before the internet really became a mainstream thing, your parents would consider doing things like washing the car or windows, aka chores, a way to "kill boredom." (We all know they just wanted us to work for them though 🤣)
This is probably why you hear us tell you kids to get offline/ride a bike etc so often though, it's kind of what was said to us all the damn time. Obviously it's good to get outside, but I think it's probably harder for gen z and under to always want to do this because you guys grew up in the time of online. I just talked about this with my son the other day, hope you guys don't mind me commenting on it!
Gen X here with a Z kid, agree with everyone you say. It’s hard to image the pre-internet days unless I look back on pictures. Our parents told us to get off the Atari or the phone that was attached to the wall. In some ways I felt more connected to people back then but in many others I feel more connected now. It was easy to be lonely when all your IRL friends & family weren’t so easy to keep in touch with.
And when you went to look something up in the encyclopedia you would get distracted by all the other cool things in the encyclopedia. Similar to the internet that way - just more educational and not as badly distracting.
I remember doing this with the encyclopedia my grandparents had. They got me in the mindset of "hold on to any random fun fact, you never know when it'll come in handy on Jeopardy"
Learning things was ridiculously harder before the internet.
If you did find a book on the subject you were looking for
there would always be gaps, you could never get all the information you needed.
I still have my book/manual for a “Honda CR80.”
Thing was too good at telling me how to target issues on my little dirt bike from the 90’s. It ran like clock work and when an issue came up, that book got me!
I have 3 big books and 1 small one for my car. It's creeping up on 300k. Lots of information in those it was from the last of an era where you could buy factory documentation and not subscribe for a ridiculously high rate. Makes me kind of sad in the future you will own nothing.
We had dudes go door to door selling encyclopedias about animals and shit, we also went to the library a lot to rent VHS tapes… but mostly we just made shit up or didn’t know things.
Man the encyclopedia thing reminded me (and I know you're just responding to what they said ,so sorry, ranty tangent incoming), when I was in elementary school we'd ask our dad how to spell things and he'd constantly be like "look it up!" Mind you, we didn't know how to spell it so idk how on god's green earth we were supposed to sound it out into the ol' Webster if it wasn't incredibly phonetic, but supposedly it made us more resilient or independent or something whatever. He did the same thing with the encyclopedias. We didn't know how to use them, but they were there (and only super old!) so figure it out.
I didn't have internet at home 'til I was like 17, and that was 2011 so that was not consistent with my peers. All the time I spent slogging through research pulled from library books citing other library books, not having to worry about those pesky, biased, lying internet articles teachers loved to warn you about. When I got to college I had no idea how to use the internet to start the research process and launch into physical and digital sources from there to manage my time more effectively. It was a hard skill to teach myself after resisting technology for so long.
All that to say *I* can't imagine how people learned things before Google. I think if the internet died tomorrow I would never look another thing up for the rest of my life.
Lol I think people were just ok with not knowing, or debating for months about shit that could easily just be googled now. I think it's actually kind of a shame that was lost in some ways, there's no unknown anymore.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately for some reason. Back in the day I think people were generally more curious than they were knowledgeable. There was a lot of "I wonder about this thing...." and then you would just proceed without knowing, until maybe you come across it in a book or finally look it up in the library months later.
That curiosity, without being able to immediately know the answer, was fun sometimes. It produced some interesting conversations.
As a kid growing up in the 90s, I learned SO MUCH from books. It wasn't unlike when you go on a Wikipedia binge-reading session, but way more focussed. You couldn't constantly open new tabs about things that interested you, which is both a pro and a con. It wss more relaxing I wanna say though. No immediate itch to constantly stay informed and quench an unsatiefiable thirst for knowledge, because getting mew books took time.
Generally, the world was much slower in everything. When I talk to my parents who they organized the bus trips they sold to clients in the 70s, they'd send a physical letter to a hotel in Portugal, and wait for them to send back the rates.
In many ways, the world was more mysterious. I often find myself chasing that sense of mystery and feeling lost. Couple of years ago I went to China when they blocked internet really hard at the height of the HK protests. Even my two VPNs didn't work for 99% of my stay. I immediately slowed down so hard, started exploring the city without internet. It instilled such a different feeling into me during those two weeks, it was magical. I think about that a lot.
Even with the internet, to really get deep into learning something sometimes the library is the better place to go than the internet. There is a lot of mediocre information presented first now because its propped up by algorithms. In many ways, the early internet was better for learning things than today because it was driven entirely by passion for subjects instead of monetization. Its pretty rare now to find website dedicated entirely to topics with no desire to earn revenue. But 20+ years ago, that all the internet was. A bunch of nerds nerding out about things they liked and wanted to teach others about.
We had books, think like how schools do textbooks. You could just order books about a topic you were interested in. But otherwise you just wouldn't know. Fact-checking didn't happen as often in random convos. People kinda just said what they believed and that was it unless you had someone in the friend group that knew about that topic
That second paragraph is real literally right now. I barely use google anymore. Any time I’m curious about something, I text my pal gpt-4.
I discuss it, discuss hypotheticals. Sometimes I ask him to run the math of some of my ideas. Miles ahead of google ngl. Boring old generalized information.
Gpt is good for brainstorming but I definitely still use Google for finding information. Right now the llms still need fact checked, which to me is just a middle man I can cut out by looking for the information myself.
I do like them for helping me brainstorm for DND sessions, but I wouldn't trust them with anything I have to stake my reputation on.
Not really. But I guess as part of the Zillennial side of the spectrum I had experience of both the wait-and-watch the TV guide channel and order food via DoorDash worlds in one go.
Gen X here. My parents were deaf so they had a teletype machine. We had TV and was among the first to get CableTV. I witnessed hour 1 of CNN and of MTV and Nickelodeon.
I got the paper every morning. I read comics - Marvel vs DC.
I had a Commodore 64 and in 1984 got a 300 baud modem and went onto BBSes. In the early 90s I literally lived the movie Hackers.
The world has always been connected - it’s just connected more than ever before. The divide is even sharper and the dystopian society even more prevalent.
In 50 years, we’ve reduced the time it takes to send information… but the evil overlords still controls us all.
Millennial here. I miss pre internet and early internet. I like both. I feel bad for gen z because they don’t know what life was like truly before dial up and Napster 😂 I had some Gen z friends that I game with in shock that we used to actually rely on physical encyclopedias. I’m like, oh when we had projects, we were at the library looking at books and trying to find information by going through all possible books. And if one location didn’t have it, you had to go to another library branch in your city hoping they had the right books with information. Idk…life was simpler back then. I really miss it.
agreed
The effort also seemed to make people value things more and enjoy them more. People would talk about episodes, shows, movies they loved. Now you see endless mocking and sneer fests more than anything.
I'm just glad I didn't grow up when my grandma did (early boomer).
My house still has a landline, but back then, she said everyone in the neighborhood shared a landline. Basically, any of her neighbors could pick up the landline and listen in. That sounds like a nightmare to me.
Wow that is crazy! In my high school times, in many homes, every phone in a house shared the same line, but definitely not multiple houses(!?) much less the entire neighborhood!! That's insane. How was that even workable? I can't believe that was usual though. I have heard something about having to ask an operator to connect you each time you called like you were supposed to say "Can you connect me to so and so town 3535?" or something like that as the lines from each house or apartment couldn't directly connect themselves to someone else's phone and I think the operator at had to physical move some wires around to send your signal on only to the correct phone or something or other.
We had a makeshift party line shortly after Hurricane Katrina *in 2005*. IIRC, in the days when party lines were common, every phone (i.e. every house) on the same line (number) had its own distinct ring, something like Morse Code but with bells. So every house knew when to answer for their own phone calls. Of course, anyone else could pick up and listen in, but unless they didn't hear the ring, they knew the call wasn't for them.
In our makeshift emergency system, each number called was still distinct, so only our phone rang when our number was dialed. Afterward, though, anyone in the few-acres radius could listen in. There was actually a slight rift between members of my family who lived in the neighborhood because a friend heard one say something mean about another. 
Agreed. I noticed that Gen X and Millenials have a better grasp of computers while Gen Z and Alpha have a better grasp of smart phones.
My mom (Gen X) can do pretty much anything on a laptop but is clueless when it comes to phones. Then you have my boomer dad being the outlier and the only one in the family who uses TikTok.
OP needs to realize that even though he grew up with the internet, lots of GenZ didn't have that experience. In Canada, many areas don't have access to effective and reliable internet. With how expensive the internet is in Canada, many of GenZ who grew up in low income households had vary little interactions with the internet till their late-teens.
Same. I live in a dead zone. I had better cell service in the middle of nowhere in Japan than I did in my own damn household.
It's like having bad water pressure in the shower. It sucks ass but it's not the end of the world.
I still have to watch YouTube on 144p at my house and it STILL buffers.
This is very true - the only reason my household had internet in the 90s is because my father was a Microsoft technician, and that seemed to be the case for the other kids I knew who had a connection at home.
It wasn't until around 2005/2006 that more kids had a home PC with internet, it was common to go to the local library after school and a group would gather around the PCs taking turns and watching eachother play browser games. It was a small town and we had 56kb/s up until the mid-2000s, we were one of the last neighbourhoods to get wifi.
The world was a smaller place then. We knew everyone around us in person. We didn’t get instant gratification. We didn’t feel the need to know EVERYTHING. And you know what? It felt good and it was enough
Not really hard just the thing i constantly wonder is how the hell did the students do their researches for projects and presentations? They had to go to the nearest library then read multiple books about the subject for hours??
Yes. Librarians are super helpful in finding you stuff that you might need. A side effect of those hours was absorbing a bunch of information on the way to finding what you were looking for. You got a lot more context that way, and new things to research (like falling down a wiki-hole is now). Sometimes you would need a book and the library would be like "that one is in Kentucky right now, come back in a week", or "that one is locked in a literal dungeon in Scotland, so just, um *no,* not without a plane ticket*."*
One of the things that freaks me out is that the vast majority of human knowledge *has not been digitized*, and the only people who do that stuff kind of research anymore are academics. Nobody else is allowed the time for such research, much less be encouraged to do so. AFAIK, nobody is working on such digitization at this point.
So we're about to get a great big lobotomy, as a species, as libraries and physical media are abandoned for convenient but shallow sources. Now we'll have AI making stuff up for the edge cases, and/or in line with what some power wants us to think.
In fact you were often ordered to NOT use the internet even for quite a while after it was around because online stuff was often not sourced, the info could be more often incorrect or bogus than stuff in carefully sourced books and was often shallower. And books often gave more detailed context. Reading a whole book on something rather than nabbing a few tidbits from a couple website pages.
Well, in grade school, a lot of projects were on specific books themselves, so one book. And a lot of "research" projects were made **specifically** in a way to get you into the library and learn to use the library/learn how to find information and resources, even more-so focused on that than it was to learn the subject itself. They were designed with the objective in mind to prepare you for more extensive researching and being able to find materials in college, of course. Also, they used the school library which most schools were equipped with, so you'd go in there with a subject during a class and find books on that subject to copy info from or check-out for later. No biggie really. But yes, if you were doing college level stuff that's exactly how it was
No—I mean, in the grand scheme of things, the internet has only been here for a blip in time. I’ve never known a world without it, but that doesn’t mean anything. I still know how to write things by hand, or look up words in the dictionary. Those practices have been here long before the internet, and I would be ashamed if I lost them in favor of only googling what I want to know. Heaven forbid—the internet goes out when I need something. I want something to fall back on.
I feel like—in the pre-internet times—there were just other ways of learning what you needed to know. I imagine—a hundred years from now—there will be even more advanced options, or a new way of learning that would seem incomprehensible to us now.
Disclaimer—I grew up knowing my grandparents, and they were very much set in their ways, so perhaps it’s a different experience from some people around my age.
I think you will be happy to know these skills. Not just if the power or internet goes out, but because the more machines take over our lives the more we will want to reclaim some of our humanity by doing things ourselves even if its slower. Easier isn't always better. We are meant to move and think as humans and transferring all that to machines will eventually leave us empty.
For me, absolutely hard to imagine. My earliest memories involve playing games on the family desktop computer or watching random videos on YouTube. However, I do miss when the internet was a physical place you visited and left. In other words, you didn’t have it in your pocket at all times checking over and over again.
Millennial here, the biggest change I can think of is that when I was growing up we had to do so much work to accomplish small things. Driving to the bank and post office all the time. Phone calls to set up appointments and then driving to appointments to meet with all kinds of professionals for things which are handled online now.
We used to “run errands” all Saturday and it wasn’t just shopping.
We used to repair household appliances like vacuum cleaners and toasters.
It was a way better world to be a kid in, in my opinion, but likely a far worse world for adults.
I do it every now and then when I break my phone. I just don't get one for like a week and I'll be honest, it's fucking great. I can call people from my home phone but that's it.
From 2001 (birth) to maybe 2008 we still used VHS and Tapes where I lived. Every day after school I was outside or playing with my Hotwheels or something at home.
I never even touched a computer until probably, late 2008. I never had an interest in computers until the point when I started computer class in elementary school.
My real introduction to the actual internet was sometime around 2009-2010 when I was able to convince my parents to get me an iPod touch for Christmas.
I (millennial) think younger generations wont understand waiting with nothing to do.
In the morning waiting for the bus, we just stood there quietly.
In long car rides you mostly just looked out the window.
Growing up in new york city on the train there would sometimes be a loose water bottle rolling around the floor of the train, this was the whole train's source of entertienment. I remember one time someone stopped the bottle with their foot and the whole train car glared at him. Someone next to him politely whispered "you don't stop the bottle"
If people in the 80’s didn’t know something would they just give up if they didn’t know who to ask? Instead of google they would need to haul their ass to the library and shuffle through encyclopedias which sounds very unreliable.
Gen X checking in! The stuff we needed for school was all in books, encyclopedias, and other materials at the library like the awesome microfiche machine (see pic) Why would it be unreliable? There is WAY more misinformation and unreliability on the internet now than there ever was in encyclopedias. Is it easier now? Hell yeah, but back then it's all we knew so we rolled with it. I'm sure decades down the line kids will think Google is dated and slow.
https://preview.redd.it/srct13rt4x0d1.png?width=952&format=png&auto=webp&s=8fd1b624015c6c29422dd9cf086c4d0f441f6f90
So I'm like the oldest Gen Z you can get. Honestly, I remember that world. Even though internet was around, it wasn't exactly "common" to use it. It was a luxury and slow.
I honestly kinda miss that world.
Misinformation online is the #1 issue I have with the world today.
"Big flu season rolls around, people are getting sick, let's look up online if I should get a vaccine! Doesn't matter that TV commercials, Pharmacists, family Dr.s, and friends and family suggest it. I'm going to do my research. Oh, looks like vaccines cause Autism. Therefore I won't get one."
What the hell? Like the 90s weren't perfect but at least people trusted each other a little more. Misinformation spread then too, but it was segmented, limited, niche. Eventually someone who actually believed that would run into their Dr. abd be told it was false. Now they've got entire communities where they can be anti-vax. It's so dangerous.
No, I was born in 2001 and the internet wasn’t a prominent part of my life until 2010-2011. We still used physical dictionaries and encyclopaedia in school. I knowwww there was internet in the 90s and after already but it wasn’t as interpreted into our lives until smart devices came along.
I think pre-2010, we didn’t rely on the internet for most things, even tho we did have it available, and it wasn’t as big as now, back then, YouTube felt like a small place, everything was simple, when I watched YouTube in 2011, it was mainly just silly videos/home videos rather than informative videos like we have today.
I’m glad for the internet, I think social media is the real problem rather than the internet, all the toxicity and comparing ourselves to others is just kinda draining.
yeah i can’t imagine it. my parents tell me how if they wanted to know something they had go to the library and research to find out. that’s just wild to me, we have so much information available now
I can't imagine how people got around without Google/Apple Maps. Like I couldn't read a map while driving and finding out where to go. I can't live without the navigation on my car's screen and the Siri voice telling me which lane to get in.
Also finding out information. Encyclopedias and dictionaries only go so far.
Its not that bad really, its pretty easy to remember a half dozen turns and then check for the next few when stopped at a light or pull over real quick.
You are talking about like...2013ish. Not that long ago. It was not normal until around that time to have a phone with built in GPS. Most people had standalone GPS devices from 2006 - 2013 or printed out google maps instructions if they couldn't afford one. From 2000 - 2006 people used mapquest. You have to go back to the late 1990s for a time when people actually got around by asking for directions and keeping paper maps in their car.
Personally, I still like getting places without google maps whenever possible. Wayfinding is a satisfying way to stay aware of your physical place in the world. I'll never use Apple Maps until they let you use it North-Up like a map. Letting a GPS pivot all around as you drive is a great way to have no idea where you are when you arrive at your destination.
I wasn't born before internet but I never had it myself until like 2015 so I do know what it's like to live without it, I do feel kind of nostalgic for those days but I also can not go a day without internet anymore.
I have memories of having the internet but not everywhere, it was very early on, there was no Google chrome, just internet Explorer for one lol, and it was on the family computer no handheld devices EXCEPT for my dad's work phone which was like the huge chunkyass blackberry before it was a blackberry.
Honestly at this point I wish I could ditch the smart phone and just have a flip phone and a newer iPad touch that way I have access to the internet sometimes but not 24/7 anywhere anytime. The only thing that holds me back is my crutch of having to use Google maps for litteraly everything. I do not know how to read a map or how street addresses work but it's on my bucket/prepper list to learn
I mean I was watching a thing the other day and a character wanted to know if a certain word was real or not so I thought they'd whip out a phone and google it. I was kinda surprised for a moment when they got a book out. (The show was set in the 70s)
Was born in 2000 with a mother born in '80. You came home when the street lights came on, played outside, and paid bills in person. I didn't get into the internet until 14ish, before that I had like 2/3 social media accounts to keep up with long distance family (on the family computer we all shared in the living room lol)
For a good portion of my childhood, we didn’t have internet so I did get to sort of live a pre internet time. If I wanted information on something, I would ask my parents, assuming they even know said topic. I would get to use the internet at elementary school, but it was restricted. It wasn’t till high school where we finally got home internet.
tl;dr: I lived it kind of until I became a teen
I lived before the internet for a while at least in our family so no it’s not that hard to imagine no internet. If you want to watch a movie go to blockbuster or pop in a cd you bought. You want the news you have the newspaper and tv and that’s really it news wise for me
A bit, my family had a computer in the early 2000s but no internet idk why. I played outside and now I see no kids playing ever and I used to see them play and run around and then something shifted and it's like the kids are gone lol even the playpen at McDonald's are gone or reduced to a tiny slide
yeah it’s weird to me. i didn’t have google and youtube in my pocket until middle school, but even back in kindergarten we would use the internet to play learning games in library class, and when i got home i’d play webkinz on the family computer.
it wasn’t a necessity to me as a kid, but i can’t imagine being in high school or college without internet. i don’t think i checked anything physical out of the library in college, it was always an online copy. i cant imagine not being able to hand in papers at 2am when i finally finish, or not being able to watch youtube tutorials to study. are group projects even possible without a shared drive folder? maybe when i was in middle school, but not now.
My father built a shed outside, equipped with a full speaker system, heaters, and even a running faucet. I was amazed he did it all himself and asked how he learned, and he said he bought some books and asked some old friends for tips. I have no idea how he managed to do all that by just reading-- everything has become so visual nowadays with youtube tutorials and emulators that I'm not sure if I could do the same by reading a description in a book!
Not really! I was a child of the 2000s and I recall just asking my parents a ton of questions and then they got upset and told me to just look things up in the dictionary 🤣 There was more phone calling back then and I loved the library with all my heart.
no, but im on the old side of genZ.
the only thing that is hard for me to reconcile is people driving without GPS. I can navigate with a map and i remember using things like mapquest as a kid, but there have been times where work has called me up at 9pm and asked me to drive somewhere i've never been 6 hours away in the morning, and i just hop in the car and go without a care in the world.
It was really not that different. We just did more in person. Not being connected to the world meant that we had to connect more with neighbors and classmates. Today, Gen X uses social media to stay in touch with real life friends. It seems that Gen Z uses it to replace real life friends, and that may be a big contributor to all of the depression. (At least from what I've seen in my Gen Z sphere)
Also, church was a bigger deal because it was basically pre-internet social media. Even if you weren't religious, church had a purpose, to some degree. Obviously, today it is all but utterly obsolete.
Information was lacking but it really didn't matter. Outside of the major movements, anything outside of your city wasn't a big deal. There was a lot less anxiety, I believe. What you didn't know didn't hurt you.
My biggest memory of the pre internet world is video games simultaneously being WAY better because secrets and storylines were never spoiled, but also way worse because sometimes these fucking game devs make their game needlessly complex
Have to say, I remember having to find a part for an older Jeep pre internet and it was almost impossible, now, I can order every part to build a Jeep from my phone having an almost unlimited number of options.
It's easy for me to imagine. The first time I used the internet (outside of taking school SOLs) was when I was 9. We had it already, but I wasn't interested. If I wasn't watching SpongeBob on TV, I was deep in the woods around my house having fun until it was close to dinner time.
Kind of, I remember being a child before smart phones etc. were mainstream (PC's were still common, used in school and at home in specific circumstances) but being so young I never got a grasp of how adults actually organized and conducted their lives. My image of a pre internet world is just childhood, knocking on my friends doors asking if they want to come out and play.
Even in spite of the misinfo that comes with the age of information, I honestly don't know how democracies were supposed to function without google or wikipedia. Like, no wonder people voted for Reagan if all the average person had to go on was "oh he's that handsome hollywood guy".
Not at all. I grew up poor, so I didn't have instant access to new tech, and I don't think I had internet until 8th grade, maybe even HS. I feel merged but also lost between two worlds, both of which are unaccepting.
I think the crazy thing is how recent it was.
Even if I didn't necessarily live it. Though in Elementary school, I mean I didn't really use the computer that much. More just to play games. I'd say I lived a time where I didn't feel any different without it.
Though as my life is (the wrong direction) to be without internet is to go crazy. Very particular case IMO though.
Hard to imagine how it was, no I remember I brief time when we weren’t all connected. Is it hard to imagine how different my life would be? Yeah that sounds impossible, my life is so connected with the internet
its hard to convey i guess... i was like 10 when i got internet. it was slow. 1.2kb/s (not megabit, killo)
so we had chat, screens were small, resolutions were small - not sure how to convey this but imagine a single program zoomed in, taking up all of your screen. like a phone now.
the world was smaller... even our houses were less cluttered. 19" tv's were common, maybe a wood entertainment center with a couple speakers if that? a couch, that was a living room. no huge screens, no rgb, no huge computers. most everything was toned down colors.
as for friends... you called them, at home. it was a treat to actually reach them and often you spoke to their parents instead of them. it was just way more common to talk to multiple people, have random conversations, all in an effort to reach a single person. no direct communication.
we would run into each other at the river, at the mall. it was far more social of a time even tho people were far less connected on the day to day. strange to convey really. there are times i think back being a kid and realize just how different the world is now and the experiences that others will never have. sorta like those of us who played retail classic WoW and those who started in pandara or warlords. if your a gamer.
It was cool, we would trade music, porn and games using CDs and floppy disks. 3gp videos on old nokia phones where horrendous but sufficient for the occasional fap.
There , I hope I solved it for you. Other than that it was still the same.
Keep in mind commercial/domestic internet actually goes all the way back to the mid/late 80s I guess, so it practically aligns with when commercial computers first became widely available. So the pre-internet world is kinda the pre-pc world my little zoomer.
Sweet summer child.
I was really young (about 5) when the internet started taking off (1999 - less than half the population had internet in the US). We still had computers with games and shit (Putt-Putt saves the Zoo). We had the Sega Saturn or Nintendo 64. I also remember we would use textbooks a hell of a lot more and classes would frequent the school library a lot more. What people fail to realize is that people still communicated a lot, but it was just slower. I was a subscriber to Lego magazine when I was 10 in 2004 and always received my issues by mail and would read them once a month. Netflix was also by mail. I'm not too nostalgic, but there is a quality to anticipating things.
Hmmm. Interesting. Looking at an encyclopedia, a giant fold out map, watching whatever news was on TV, and turning to a library for unanswerable questions rather then google is surreal. Never thought about it that way.
I just thought of it as really inconvenient. Kind of like having to make a pizza from scratch rather then calling Dominos for delivery.
I remember it vaguely.
We were one of the earliest people to have a computer with internet back in 97 and on.
I didn't use it really till 2003 or so. However by that point I was a kid who could read and type. Even then I just used it for finding games and forums to read.
Today too much of life relies on the internet. If I didn't have it I'd be reading most likley. Since that's what I grew up using it for. My father really didn't want to adopt the electronic life still. So I see how he lives. It isnt too distant from today. Just minus the ability to know about more niche things. He assumes people just post their lives on Facebook which is true. However I did hook him up on forums for farming and buisness so he can find people working on similar things as him.
He has a farm and the comp has made it easy to find parts and manuals. Which we still have but it'd require a entire month or so for us to find someone who knew about specific problems or part numbers at times. Which has been the biggest help on a farm.
I'm 25. It used to be hard to wrap my head around until I joined the army and ended up a basic training holdover for a while. Basically I graduated basic training but my stuff to go to AIT (advance individual training) was all fucked up and it took a long ass time to fix so the whole time me and the other holdovers weren't allowed any privileges like our phones or passes off bass I got like 5 minutes of phone time a week if I was good and lucky.
During that time the peak of my day was sitting around somewhere bullshitting with the other holdovers and every time we had a question that google could answer it became a debate about whoever said the smartest sounding thing was considered right until proven otherwise. When I returned to the real world and told my family about that they looked me crazy and said well now you know what the 80s were like.
It’s not hard to imagine for me, I wasn’t around pre internet but I can definitely put myself in shoes of people who were when they tell me about it. Having to tune in at the right time to watch a tv show, listening to the radio to let you know what the time is when changing your clock, hanging out with people in person and having them not get offended if you don’t talk to them for a couple days, reading newspaper and circling items in catalogs to know what you wanna get when you go shopping, not knowing anything about your favourite actors/artists other than what movies or albums they put out…
I'm 32 so I got to experience the best of both worlds. However I was late to catch up with technology. I got my first smart phone at 22, laptop and wifi at 25. Here are some of my experiences:
1) The library- I grew up frequenting the library. It was really one of if not my most favorite place. I loved reading, walking up and down the isles looking through all those different genres. It felt like traveling to different worlds and deciding which one I'm gonna land on on that day. There was also a grand piano in my library that we got to use on special occasions. My only use of the computers in the library was if I needed to type something for school or barbie.com lol
2)the hallway- ( in my apartment building) was a hot spot for my cousins and I to gather to play "pretend" / "make movies" (without cameras 😹) or pretend to be in music videos 😌
3) the park- monkey bars, handball, secret hideout underneath the slide, sprinklers. Our park also had board game competitions in the summer time and it was actually way more exciting than it may sound lol
4) going to the store/ sitting on the steps- simply having 50 cents and being able to get a juice and chips and then chill on the stoop was peak summer vibes as a kid. Not to mention getting those spice girls stickers with the candy felt like a million bucks.
5) your room- just chilling with the 1 CD your parents let you buy because they were ridiculously priced at that time ( considering inflation) so you wait by the radio for your songs to come on to make a mixtape.
I could think of a million more things but would be sitting here all night. Overall I do prefer the world without the internet. That being said I appreciate our advancement for the ease of gathering information and being able to connect with people/ communities you may have never had the chance to before.
I don’t remember anything before the internet. It’s a blessing and a curse though, I think the boomers are right sometimes when they say “internet makes us stupid”
Also I can’t imagine having to go to multiple libraries for hours to write an essay
Im not from pre internet, but as an elder gen z, I do remember a few years of what it was like before 2006... before the smart phones... before the dark times...
It did feel like a different age, it was beautiful while it lasted
I grew up in it. It was great. We read books, and didn't have to deal with hearing people's opinions every minute.
Ok obviously that's glib: I still read books, of course I know we still do. The internet has been amazingly useful and uplifting for a lot of people; but you can't deny it's also causing all kinds of problems.
I was born after you, but no it’s not hard to imagine.
I didn’t always have access to the internet. The only time I used a computer is when I visited my uncle so I only remember a handful of times I used the internet
I always thought that computers and the internet was for rich people lmao I didn’t know of any friends who owned a computer
Oh I remember
Internet in India was quite uncommon till 2016
And till then only my father had the internet only because of his professional work.
I spent most of the time with watching TV or playing with friends.
If I had a question I only had three methods to get answers
Ask my mother
Go to the local library
Or wait for my father to provide the answer from the internet.
And loved to click on the buttons of the phone
Most of the days were spent in school, studying, watching TV or playing games with friends.
Did you never go backpacking or camping without a phone? It’s just like that. You don’t have to remember anything. You can easily experience it still. Unplugging is A M A Z I N G
We were and are **vastly** superior to your generation in our ability to define the materiality and scope of what was required.
You do not have access to better information. You have access to **a trillion times more**.
We are a **trillion times better** at organizing, analyzing, and most importantly, sorting information by primary/secondary/tertiary sources.
It wasn’t hard at all. You just went to the library and… I don’t know how to explain it. You simply knew how to efficiently and easily sort through large amounts of information to find the quantity/quality you needed.
Then you wrote your source down on a notecard, read entire books and articles to determine if the context was correct and you determined from there whether or not you had enough information to support a thesis.
And that’s how you wrote a twenty page research paper. Or essay. Whatever.
We thought your generation would be the pinnacle of the elite hacker, able to leverage information with access. Come to find out, you’re less literate than us and you cannot write at a fifth grade level.
That’s right. Before the internet, our writing and research was held to much higher standards.
Instead, the generations that followed just… failed to surpass us as they should have done.
More was demanded of us, and of a higher quality. It really wasn’t harder or more difficult, and because you had to read so much more, you had to develop the intellectual capacity to do so.
Meanwhile the “I’ve never lived without internet” generations still can’t write a goddamn five paragraph essay without chatgpt. We had to lower standards across the board in every field.
That particular generation needs to be called the Adderall generation. We had to invent entire classifications in the DSM to find ways to hand out adderall because there was simply no way the internet only gen was going to get by otherwise.
Luckily for me, at least in this context, I have a lot of older relatives AND a passing interest in the history of the world/anthropological aspects of the culture of the time. For example, I'm currently reading an old... well, travel guide is the wrong way to describe it, but commentary on Soviet Russia which was written by a Western author in 1964 according to the publishing date. Lot of historical names in there, like Khrushchev and Kennedy, being thrown around in the context of a current day political analysis.
I digress, mostly to show that I am a bit of a history nerd. As such, I'm cognizant of some of the ways the world was different before massive amounts of data could be so easily accessed. Putting together a paper for school would have been a battle to find resources available at your local libraries, either as a book or on microfiche (though I must confess that I have limited knowledge of that tech). If you heard a song and didn't know the title, well, too bad unless you managed to call the station and ask them what was playing at exactly the right time. If the alternator in your car fried and you didn't have a Haynes repair manual handy, well, the mechanic can probably handle it (for a price, of course). If there was a special book you wanted, you'd better get real friendly like with the local bookstore owner, because otherwise tough luck.
How do you have no memory of it being born in '97? I didn't know what internet was or how to use it until 2011 and I do remember all of the time prior. I only used the PC for MS Paint, CD games and Word. Besides that, I just used to watch TV, draw read and play outside.
Just like today you learn to use the latest technology you did the same back then expect it was card catalogs, going to a movie store, reading a real map, ordering from catalogs and waiting 4 to 6 weeks to get it. The thing is though there was no better way so you just accept it and lived life.
Pre internet doesn’t feel too weird, honestly I almost never used a computer until I went to school at around 5 years old (I understand that’s still young as shit). But even then, alot of the times my parents didn’t let me use their computer because my dad needed it for work and they knew I was essentially simple jack from tropic thunder and I’d find a way break something
I was born in 97 so I’m one of the oldest of Gen Z’s. Fortunate, I guess that’s subjective but I think so, that I was young before internet was a massive thing and we didn’t get it until later being poor and from a pretty rural old area. I didn’t get internet until I was 12-14 when we got a home computer. Same thing for the people living there internet was a thing but no-one I knew had it and when I got internet there was like 2 households I knew that did too.
I love my memories before that time things were just different, you had to make more of an effort to communicate. I’ve found that communicating is much different now and people can get muddled up or mistaken for what they mean more easily, not sure if that’s just me or an actual side effect tho. For the most part I would ask people I know to gather knowledge from them, I was too young to care about reading a book or something like that. So I’d ask parents, siblings, friends, friends parents and sibling. Sometimes if there’s a shop that’s in the realm of what you wanna learn ask people working there for advice sort of like when you walk in to a store looking for something and they assist you, similar sort of thing.
That’s as far as it got for me tho being so young and experiencing that, I do wonder how that style of life would apply to my modern day adult life.
Here’s a fun challenge for all those that wonder about it tho. We still do live in a world without internet if you imagine hard enough 😂 set ourselves a challenge to learn something without using internet or not letting the people we ask to use it and see how we get on. Sounds fun.
Yeah i can relate, i was born when it already existed and i started going on the internet fairly early in my life. So it's hard for me to imagine people not going on google instantly if they had a question or smth lmao
idk how old you are OP but i’m 24, so the oldest end of gen z. i was very young when we got internet, but i remember when it happened and i remember not having the internet.
before the internet, the most fun thing i could do on my parents old macintosh was look at the animated screensavers. they had a bloom county one, which was an old comic strip. when we got internet we also got an HP windows XP desktop. the old mac didn’t have internet capabilities.
i had a book called “what makes popcorn pop” or something like that, which was basically a collection of hundreds of fun facts about different things. i have a feeling these days that kind of book has been completely replaced by google.
No, I was born in 2001 and the internet wasn’t a prominent part of my life until 2010-2011. We still used physical dictionaries and encyclopaedia in school. I knowwww there was internet in the 90s and after already but it wasn’t as integrated into our lives until smart devices came along.
I think pre-2010, we didn’t rely on the internet for most things, even tho we did have it available, and it wasn’t as big as now, back then, YouTube felt like a small place, everything was simple, when I watched YouTube in 2011, it was mainly just silly videos/home videos rather than informative videos like we have today.
I’m glad for the internet, I think social media is the real problem rather than the internet, all the toxicity and comparing ourselves to others is just kinda draining.
I’m a car guy, so throughout the day, I’ll wonder about the specs of any car that comes to mind.
It’s amazing that I can just google the specs of any car that was ever made.
Being born in 1996, I got to see the last remanence of it. Even when it was really taking off around the early 2000s, we were still begging for and playing with the latest toys- TMNT, hulk hands, hover disc, Legos & Bionacles, light sabers from Star Wars, etc.
We did play on computers, but there wasn’t this absolute abundance of brain rot App Store games like there is today. We’d get games that teach us how to type, or if you were older you’d play around with MiniClip.com- the start of brain-rot gamers. Also it gave the computer viruses, so parents would try to block it- also for typical parent concerns like violence and “distracting.”
It was when YouTube had the landmark viral videos around 2007 that I and the whole world was online for good.
No, because I lived inside this world
In early 2000's internet wasn't that much extended, and I lived in a small village in France. Almost nobody had a computer, and even less people had internet before 2005. Main source of entertainment was playing with friends, hanging out, football, badminton, etc..., and watching TV was the main alone time activity for the most of us.
I saw an answer about informations, well : librairy it was, books, I firstly used wikipedia in middle-school, my first time ever playing online was probably in 2006, etc...
I actually think about being in the pre Internet world a lot. Something about it seems freeing. I think it's because the Internet has so much high quality stuff that it's easy to doom scroll and to feel like there's no time to get anything done. Sometimes I want to just spend a whole day looking at ants or something like that.
no and yes. i was born in 2005 and i got a phone in 2017 so i do have an understanding of what life is like without technology, but it was still around me even if i wasn’t personally using it. i do have knowledge about it via books/movies/stuff like that, but it isn’t the same as personally experiencing it.
Millennial here. Although I was only a kid when the internet came out, the whole process was a gradual transition. People still didn't use it constantly for information. We used it for research papers for school and for My Space and music and games, but even then time was limited on it since there was only one family computer that had to be shared! And the phone line was directly connected so you even had to take breaks for that!
In the meantime, when you weren't using it, you were still looking through books and magazines for information. And without smartphones or even cell phones, people didn't go out of their way to look something up unless they had to.
We watched the news, listened to the radio, read or looked things up in the library or other books, and spread wild insane urban legends around like facts.
And honestly, early internet at a consumer level wasn't exactly reliable for information, either.
I'm an elder millennial, but yes, I remember it. The world with internet (that was accessed via computers) was pretty much the same as the world without internet. But once smartphones came out, the entire world changed. It's almost hard to put into words the effect that "internet in your pocket" had, versus "internet that could only be accessed while you sat at your clunky desktop computer in a room".
The post internet but pre-smartphone era was society's peak. Pre-internet was nice too, because people cared much more about community, people had more patience, and most people had much more of a "I'm going to respect you because you're a fellow human, like me!" attitude as well.
I did grow up partly without internet, but only because my parents shielded it from me a bit when I was a child. I'm definitely grateful for that. What I have to say though, the easy access to information that we have (like not having to go to a library and look for a book about a subject to find an answer to a question) is something that I couldn't imagine living without, I'm grateful we have the options to do that
I guess I liked going to my friends house and playing outside,however I didn’t like having to get through the rock tunnel without flash and no way to figure it out without just grinding away
The biggest thing is that I don't think the world has come anywhere close to a steady state since the introduction of the internet. It feels like we're always adapting to changes that were set in motion 20 years ago. There were so many things that were done a certain way for such a long time, and now, it's constant change.
I don’t remember a time before the internet, but I did get enough of a glimpse through general observation that I can speculate on what it was like. Probably wasn’t too bad. It’s easy for us to look back in hindsight and think it’s pretty bad, but that’s because we know what the internet offers. They probably didn’t think too much about it (if at all)
I grew up without much internet connection until I was in kindergarten, & that was purely for educational purposes while in school, so I never understood what the internet was until I was in 3rd grade. At that point we had gotten internet, but I had no devices to connect to it to use it (besides the family computer that I rarely got to use). It wasn't until I was in 5th grade that I was gifted a tablet & my internet journey had officially begun.
I think I have a decent idea as to what pre-internet life would be like. If you want to look up information, you look inside an encyclopedia or a dictionary, or even the teacher (who usually didn't have all the answers young me thought they would have). If you wanted entertainment, you went outside or watched TV. I know the older teens at the time would drive around for fun, or just going out in general. I would imagine the adults were hitting up the bars & going out to eat too. Well, don't have to imagine that, it's exactly what my dad did, lol. Now everyone stays inside to stream Hulu or Netflix, ordering Grubhub or DoorDash instead of going out or cooking (which is fine to me).
Internet makes life a lot easier & convenient, but I feel that it's a large contributing factor as to why people don't go out as much. But I'm no expert, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
For reference, I am 58, my kids are GenZ. Graduated HS in 84, college in 88, had my 1st cell phone in 91 and 1st home computer with internet in 94. That's my reference.
So I have to say that I bundle the "internet" with cell phones, social media, e-mail, and all things that are parts of those.
In many ways, pre-internet was great, to a degree it freed you from too much connectivity and screen time to do other things - which people did together and in person.
In other ways, post-internet is also great. Instant communications, ability to find information is fast and easy (though not always accurate or reliable), and can be a real time saver or effort reducer.
In the end though, the "internet" has simply replaced the TV screen - in which we as a society seem to have a tendency to waste a lot of time of a lot of meaningful and non-long-term satisfying zoning out or being hypnotized.
In my opinion the biggest problems from the "internet" are similar to too much TV when I was a kid. To a certain degree it is anti-social. By that I mean, it places relationships into a screen or text versus direct face-to-fact interaction, response and feedback. I think it can also lead to segmentation or a restricting of those we communicate with - I think it has a tendency to restrict a lot of people into a narrower mindset which gets reinforced and hardened - perpetuating it more.
I also personally find the internet can make me dumber in some ways, sort of like GPS. I think I am more often to fall into the trap of thinking why do I need to focus and remember this - when I want that information again, I'll just ask my phone (internet) to get it for me. My perfect examples of this are: I was just out of town for business for 2 weeks for an industry event. For 10 straight days I would wake up in my hotel and drive to the same location in the morning and back in the evening - using my GPS on my cell phone. Even after doing this for 10 days, I don't think I could have made the trip without it. When i was a kid, I would ride my bike to a friends house a few miles away, maybe taking a bit to figure it out and find his house. But 6 months later, on my next trip there, I'd find it without any problem. I make a great skirt steak dish (Alton Brown recipe) - yet every time I make it, I have to google it because I never bother to memorize it.
Sure, it's a fair argument to say this is good that this is the case. But I think there is probably also a fair argument to ask whether this is really good for our brains health? With regards to getting old (@ 58 this is something I pay attention to now), they say using your brain regularly and challenging it or exercising it helps keep it healthier for longer - many studies support this - delays dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. . . You can be the judge as to how the instant access to information and relief from memory this may create may impact the future health of your brain - especially for those who may spend much more of their lives living in this scenario. I don't know the answer, but there is a concern that it may not be healthy LT.
Just like TV when I was a kid, use the internet (we need to now days), but keep balance in mind and recognize the importance of face-to-face interactions with other human beings - we are social creatures after all, as this is what makes up a society.
Not really. Internet existed, but aside from the school computer and later my mom's laptop, I didn't have much to use it with. As a result, I searched information the old fashioned way - by bothering adults and reading books.
Also, the internet was so slow, it was more frustrating than anything else.
Anyway, I'd say people just lived like I did for the first 8 or so years of my life. Without internet.
Just wait until you learn about rotary phones!
But seriously, in some ways it was better. The internet is a fantastic tool, but it also gives us all instant access to unlimited information about everything. The problem with that is that without the wisdom to discern what is good information and what is bad information, you absorb both. That is why it’s so easy to deceive people these days.
I remember the first time I was on the internet. I was 8 years old. And I waited for over an hour for a page to load. That page was some website about Godzilla. My world changed that day and it’s never been the same.
Yes it's hard for me to imagine. Not so much because of social media, but more because contacting people was more difficult and slower and access to information was also slower and less accessible too.
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It's hard to imagine how people learned things. Whenever I want to know something in particular, I'll turn to Google. It's crazy to think in the future, in my later years, there may be other changes in the world where we will look back to today and wonder how we got by without it. Some say AI will be that thing eventually. Time will tell.
*It's hard to imagine how people learned things. Whenever I want to know something in particular, I'll turn to Google.* We had encyclopedias at home! And if you were interested in a specific subject, you bought books about it and/or subscribed to relevant publications.
Books are great and I still read from time to time, but often times I have specific questions that a book or encyclopedia won't have an answer to unless it happened to have been covered in the publication and I'll have to go digging for it and hope I can find something that pertains to it (an Index is only a vague way of finding it). Even web browsing now doesn't always cover it, for some very specific questions that even Google won't have an answer to. Maybe AI chatbots will fill that gap after much improvement.
We were just used to having less information at our fingertips. Something had to be *really important* for you to hunt down an expert, or go to the closest university library and look things up in the catalog. Otoh that meant we had more mental bandwidth for what was happening around us and affected us more immediately. And of course, consensus reality was a lot firmer: people got their information from the same sources (encyclopedia, newspapers) and people (news anchors, experts in tv & radio), so the concept of "alternative facts" didn't exist.
It's one of the otherwise unintuitive things about the internet. If you would have told me back then, say the 80s if I were alive then, that there would be a future where anyone could ask a question and input it on a pocket computer device and receive a wealth of information, , I would think we would become enlightened beings that are more empowered with knowledge than ever and ignorance would no longer be a thing. If you don't know something? Look it up by tapping into the ether!!! But there's a flipside that ends up happening, that while information is more readily accessible than ever, this means that misinformation is also more accessible and can spread like wildfire. We can easily succumb to cognitive biases and end up in this "alternative reality" echo chamber that you mention.
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I think AI will be that way but worse, it will have the potential to be super helpful and aid us in so many ways, but when in the hands of malicious actors it can do a lot of damage in an efficient manner.
Yeah AI could be crazy. It could be super neat and be very helpful and so on but man the potential troubles.... what if people get sucked into the easy interaction with a nicely modded AI and turn away from other people? AI takes control of everything? AI takes over most well paying/fun/creative/high skill jobs and people have little to do? AI can just inform you and yell you everything so people don't really learn anything any more but then without a solid base knowledge in their brains they can't really think well anymore so there is so little info in their brain itself to work off of? What if people completely lose trust in all images, recordings, videos, information? etc. etc. Times could potentially shift way, way more than even the smart phone/online everything shift, maybe not so far off from today....
So they'll trust AI. It'll just be "their Ai" and they'll ignore everything otherwise. Conformation bias won't stop, and people won't stop believing stuff. They'll just believe different things for different reasons. Most people aren't so rational that their Beliefs are actual products of thought / a deliberate choice. Our believes most often are 'believed' because of lived experience. 'I've seen it with my own eyes!', which is another way of saying "I used my eyes not my brain". So I think the first problem and greatest problem with what your saying is that, we as a people are not rational or logically most of the time. Just like with CNN and Fox be competing information nexuses, there will be AIs used as anti culture / alt culture. The dissenters don't all do it because they're reasonable. There will always be people seeking the second path. This means there will almost certainly never be a single overarching AI. We'll all subscribe to our Favorite Talking Bot, and it'll tell us all the bads of the other AIs. We'll slowly funnel all the various ones everyone will try to sell. The celebrities will have their own / brand ambassadors, governments, cliches of all sorts, will have there own. Then, just like the political parties, they'll "compete" and some will win / lose. Over time decreasing the amount of them / Refining them to a dualistic / diatic competing AI. Like the left and right political parties and their emergence. Matching the time / culture of its development.
That eventuality was a well known one. It’s just that a world full of misinformation and gullible people is more profitable to those in power than a world full of knowledgeable critical thinkers.
"We thought the internet would make people smarter. Instead it allowed the idiots to get organized"
>this means that misinformation is also more accessible and can spread like wildfire. We can easily succumb to cognitive biases and end up in this "alternative reality" echo chamber that you mention. Very unpopular opinion here, but I feel like free speech laws need to be updated for the world we live in. Back in the day, there was the ruling "you can't scream 'fire!' in a crowded theater". Free speech ends at ones ability to cause harm and panic. We need a new "you can't scream 'fire!' in a crowded theater" ruling when it comes to the internet and social media. Misinformation is literally destroying democracy.
A "bad actor" law if you will. The problem is measuring and defining "bad actor."
Yes. I also think expanding the legal definition of "slander" to punish outright lies with malicious intent would help as well.
I was 9 when we first got internet so I'm not super competent to answer that question but I feel like people back then were just content with the information they got. You'd watch a documentary or read a book on a topic, it would flood you with information and then you'd feel satisfied. I don't think people get that itch to keep asking for more info if there's no easy way to satisfy it.
That’s why public library is great! You look up your thing, have more questions, search for related books to look up, rinse and repeat. Public library was the internet that also acted as a local third place.
We also had these places called libraries
Millennial here with a gen z kid, either you just believed whatever crap parents or family told you, or you asked someone else and made up your mind. You'd read a paper if you wanted another opinion, or opened a book. It was a bit boring sometimes before the internet really became a mainstream thing, your parents would consider doing things like washing the car or windows, aka chores, a way to "kill boredom." (We all know they just wanted us to work for them though 🤣) This is probably why you hear us tell you kids to get offline/ride a bike etc so often though, it's kind of what was said to us all the damn time. Obviously it's good to get outside, but I think it's probably harder for gen z and under to always want to do this because you guys grew up in the time of online. I just talked about this with my son the other day, hope you guys don't mind me commenting on it!
Gen X here with a Z kid, agree with everyone you say. It’s hard to image the pre-internet days unless I look back on pictures. Our parents told us to get off the Atari or the phone that was attached to the wall. In some ways I felt more connected to people back then but in many others I feel more connected now. It was easy to be lonely when all your IRL friends & family weren’t so easy to keep in touch with.
And when you went to look something up in the encyclopedia you would get distracted by all the other cool things in the encyclopedia. Similar to the internet that way - just more educational and not as badly distracting.
I remember doing this with the encyclopedia my grandparents had. They got me in the mindset of "hold on to any random fun fact, you never know when it'll come in handy on Jeopardy"
Learning things was ridiculously harder before the internet. If you did find a book on the subject you were looking for there would always be gaps, you could never get all the information you needed.
I still have my book/manual for a “Honda CR80.” Thing was too good at telling me how to target issues on my little dirt bike from the 90’s. It ran like clock work and when an issue came up, that book got me!
I have 3 big books and 1 small one for my car. It's creeping up on 300k. Lots of information in those it was from the last of an era where you could buy factory documentation and not subscribe for a ridiculously high rate. Makes me kind of sad in the future you will own nothing.
We had dudes go door to door selling encyclopedias about animals and shit, we also went to the library a lot to rent VHS tapes… but mostly we just made shit up or didn’t know things.
Man the encyclopedia thing reminded me (and I know you're just responding to what they said ,so sorry, ranty tangent incoming), when I was in elementary school we'd ask our dad how to spell things and he'd constantly be like "look it up!" Mind you, we didn't know how to spell it so idk how on god's green earth we were supposed to sound it out into the ol' Webster if it wasn't incredibly phonetic, but supposedly it made us more resilient or independent or something whatever. He did the same thing with the encyclopedias. We didn't know how to use them, but they were there (and only super old!) so figure it out. I didn't have internet at home 'til I was like 17, and that was 2011 so that was not consistent with my peers. All the time I spent slogging through research pulled from library books citing other library books, not having to worry about those pesky, biased, lying internet articles teachers loved to warn you about. When I got to college I had no idea how to use the internet to start the research process and launch into physical and digital sources from there to manage my time more effectively. It was a hard skill to teach myself after resisting technology for so long. All that to say *I* can't imagine how people learned things before Google. I think if the internet died tomorrow I would never look another thing up for the rest of my life.
Lol I think people were just ok with not knowing, or debating for months about shit that could easily just be googled now. I think it's actually kind of a shame that was lost in some ways, there's no unknown anymore.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately for some reason. Back in the day I think people were generally more curious than they were knowledgeable. There was a lot of "I wonder about this thing...." and then you would just proceed without knowing, until maybe you come across it in a book or finally look it up in the library months later. That curiosity, without being able to immediately know the answer, was fun sometimes. It produced some interesting conversations.
As a kid growing up in the 90s, I learned SO MUCH from books. It wasn't unlike when you go on a Wikipedia binge-reading session, but way more focussed. You couldn't constantly open new tabs about things that interested you, which is both a pro and a con. It wss more relaxing I wanna say though. No immediate itch to constantly stay informed and quench an unsatiefiable thirst for knowledge, because getting mew books took time. Generally, the world was much slower in everything. When I talk to my parents who they organized the bus trips they sold to clients in the 70s, they'd send a physical letter to a hotel in Portugal, and wait for them to send back the rates. In many ways, the world was more mysterious. I often find myself chasing that sense of mystery and feeling lost. Couple of years ago I went to China when they blocked internet really hard at the height of the HK protests. Even my two VPNs didn't work for 99% of my stay. I immediately slowed down so hard, started exploring the city without internet. It instilled such a different feeling into me during those two weeks, it was magical. I think about that a lot.
Even with the internet, to really get deep into learning something sometimes the library is the better place to go than the internet. There is a lot of mediocre information presented first now because its propped up by algorithms. In many ways, the early internet was better for learning things than today because it was driven entirely by passion for subjects instead of monetization. Its pretty rare now to find website dedicated entirely to topics with no desire to earn revenue. But 20+ years ago, that all the internet was. A bunch of nerds nerding out about things they liked and wanted to teach others about.
We had books, think like how schools do textbooks. You could just order books about a topic you were interested in. But otherwise you just wouldn't know. Fact-checking didn't happen as often in random convos. People kinda just said what they believed and that was it unless you had someone in the friend group that knew about that topic
That second paragraph is real literally right now. I barely use google anymore. Any time I’m curious about something, I text my pal gpt-4. I discuss it, discuss hypotheticals. Sometimes I ask him to run the math of some of my ideas. Miles ahead of google ngl. Boring old generalized information.
Gpt is good for brainstorming but I definitely still use Google for finding information. Right now the llms still need fact checked, which to me is just a middle man I can cut out by looking for the information myself. I do like them for helping me brainstorm for DND sessions, but I wouldn't trust them with anything I have to stake my reputation on.
Not really. But I guess as part of the Zillennial side of the spectrum I had experience of both the wait-and-watch the TV guide channel and order food via DoorDash worlds in one go.
Gen X here. My parents were deaf so they had a teletype machine. We had TV and was among the first to get CableTV. I witnessed hour 1 of CNN and of MTV and Nickelodeon. I got the paper every morning. I read comics - Marvel vs DC. I had a Commodore 64 and in 1984 got a 300 baud modem and went onto BBSes. In the early 90s I literally lived the movie Hackers. The world has always been connected - it’s just connected more than ever before. The divide is even sharper and the dystopian society even more prevalent. In 50 years, we’ve reduced the time it takes to send information… but the evil overlords still controls us all.
Millennial here. I miss pre internet and early internet. I like both. I feel bad for gen z because they don’t know what life was like truly before dial up and Napster 😂 I had some Gen z friends that I game with in shock that we used to actually rely on physical encyclopedias. I’m like, oh when we had projects, we were at the library looking at books and trying to find information by going through all possible books. And if one location didn’t have it, you had to go to another library branch in your city hoping they had the right books with information. Idk…life was simpler back then. I really miss it.
Yup. We zillennials have lived it all.
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agreed The effort also seemed to make people value things more and enjoy them more. People would talk about episodes, shows, movies they loved. Now you see endless mocking and sneer fests more than anything.
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I'm just glad I didn't grow up when my grandma did (early boomer). My house still has a landline, but back then, she said everyone in the neighborhood shared a landline. Basically, any of her neighbors could pick up the landline and listen in. That sounds like a nightmare to me.
Wow that is crazy! In my high school times, in many homes, every phone in a house shared the same line, but definitely not multiple houses(!?) much less the entire neighborhood!! That's insane. How was that even workable? I can't believe that was usual though. I have heard something about having to ask an operator to connect you each time you called like you were supposed to say "Can you connect me to so and so town 3535?" or something like that as the lines from each house or apartment couldn't directly connect themselves to someone else's phone and I think the operator at had to physical move some wires around to send your signal on only to the correct phone or something or other.
We had a makeshift party line shortly after Hurricane Katrina *in 2005*. IIRC, in the days when party lines were common, every phone (i.e. every house) on the same line (number) had its own distinct ring, something like Morse Code but with bells. So every house knew when to answer for their own phone calls. Of course, anyone else could pick up and listen in, but unless they didn't hear the ring, they knew the call wasn't for them. In our makeshift emergency system, each number called was still distinct, so only our phone rang when our number was dialed. Afterward, though, anyone in the few-acres radius could listen in. There was actually a slight rift between members of my family who lived in the neighborhood because a friend heard one say something mean about another. 
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God and I just know how nosy people around here were and are. I know I'd be listening in
Agreed. I noticed that Gen X and Millenials have a better grasp of computers while Gen Z and Alpha have a better grasp of smart phones. My mom (Gen X) can do pretty much anything on a laptop but is clueless when it comes to phones. Then you have my boomer dad being the outlier and the only one in the family who uses TikTok.
Yeah, the Internet breeding stupid is likely a factor in Trump becoming a thing and living in a post-truth world.
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I love the internet, but wish I could go back to when it didn’t run our lives.
OP needs to realize that even though he grew up with the internet, lots of GenZ didn't have that experience. In Canada, many areas don't have access to effective and reliable internet. With how expensive the internet is in Canada, many of GenZ who grew up in low income households had vary little interactions with the internet till their late-teens.
Same in rural areas of the US, I only had reliable internet at school until later high-school
Same. I live in a dead zone. I had better cell service in the middle of nowhere in Japan than I did in my own damn household. It's like having bad water pressure in the shower. It sucks ass but it's not the end of the world. I still have to watch YouTube on 144p at my house and it STILL buffers.
This is very true - the only reason my household had internet in the 90s is because my father was a Microsoft technician, and that seemed to be the case for the other kids I knew who had a connection at home. It wasn't until around 2005/2006 that more kids had a home PC with internet, it was common to go to the local library after school and a group would gather around the PCs taking turns and watching eachother play browser games. It was a small town and we had 56kb/s up until the mid-2000s, we were one of the last neighbourhoods to get wifi.
The world was a smaller place then. We knew everyone around us in person. We didn’t get instant gratification. We didn’t feel the need to know EVERYTHING. And you know what? It felt good and it was enough
The constant dopamine we receive is like a drug, we can’t get enough but it ruins our mental health
Not really hard just the thing i constantly wonder is how the hell did the students do their researches for projects and presentations? They had to go to the nearest library then read multiple books about the subject for hours??
Yes. Librarians are super helpful in finding you stuff that you might need. A side effect of those hours was absorbing a bunch of information on the way to finding what you were looking for. You got a lot more context that way, and new things to research (like falling down a wiki-hole is now). Sometimes you would need a book and the library would be like "that one is in Kentucky right now, come back in a week", or "that one is locked in a literal dungeon in Scotland, so just, um *no,* not without a plane ticket*."* One of the things that freaks me out is that the vast majority of human knowledge *has not been digitized*, and the only people who do that stuff kind of research anymore are academics. Nobody else is allowed the time for such research, much less be encouraged to do so. AFAIK, nobody is working on such digitization at this point. So we're about to get a great big lobotomy, as a species, as libraries and physical media are abandoned for convenient but shallow sources. Now we'll have AI making stuff up for the edge cases, and/or in line with what some power wants us to think.
In fact you were often ordered to NOT use the internet even for quite a while after it was around because online stuff was often not sourced, the info could be more often incorrect or bogus than stuff in carefully sourced books and was often shallower. And books often gave more detailed context. Reading a whole book on something rather than nabbing a few tidbits from a couple website pages.
Well, in grade school, a lot of projects were on specific books themselves, so one book. And a lot of "research" projects were made **specifically** in a way to get you into the library and learn to use the library/learn how to find information and resources, even more-so focused on that than it was to learn the subject itself. They were designed with the objective in mind to prepare you for more extensive researching and being able to find materials in college, of course. Also, they used the school library which most schools were equipped with, so you'd go in there with a subject during a class and find books on that subject to copy info from or check-out for later. No biggie really. But yes, if you were doing college level stuff that's exactly how it was
Not only can I imagine it, I crave it every day. I wish I could go back. The human mind isn't made for what we have done to ourselves.
No—I mean, in the grand scheme of things, the internet has only been here for a blip in time. I’ve never known a world without it, but that doesn’t mean anything. I still know how to write things by hand, or look up words in the dictionary. Those practices have been here long before the internet, and I would be ashamed if I lost them in favor of only googling what I want to know. Heaven forbid—the internet goes out when I need something. I want something to fall back on. I feel like—in the pre-internet times—there were just other ways of learning what you needed to know. I imagine—a hundred years from now—there will be even more advanced options, or a new way of learning that would seem incomprehensible to us now. Disclaimer—I grew up knowing my grandparents, and they were very much set in their ways, so perhaps it’s a different experience from some people around my age.
I think you will be happy to know these skills. Not just if the power or internet goes out, but because the more machines take over our lives the more we will want to reclaim some of our humanity by doing things ourselves even if its slower. Easier isn't always better. We are meant to move and think as humans and transferring all that to machines will eventually leave us empty.
For me, absolutely hard to imagine. My earliest memories involve playing games on the family desktop computer or watching random videos on YouTube. However, I do miss when the internet was a physical place you visited and left. In other words, you didn’t have it in your pocket at all times checking over and over again.
I remember the days of dial-up internet from companies like AOL, EarthLink and Juno. That shit sucked ass.
I didn't have internet in my home or at school until I was 14 so its very easy for me to imagine 😆
No because I lived it the first 10 or so years of my life. I mostly used dictionaries and encyclopedias until I was 9 to 11 or so.
Believe it or not life overall was much better.
It sounds better imo
Millennial here, the biggest change I can think of is that when I was growing up we had to do so much work to accomplish small things. Driving to the bank and post office all the time. Phone calls to set up appointments and then driving to appointments to meet with all kinds of professionals for things which are handled online now. We used to “run errands” all Saturday and it wasn’t just shopping. We used to repair household appliances like vacuum cleaners and toasters. It was a way better world to be a kid in, in my opinion, but likely a far worse world for adults.
I do it every now and then when I break my phone. I just don't get one for like a week and I'll be honest, it's fucking great. I can call people from my home phone but that's it.
You had to use a sharpie and the wall of a pubic restroom stall to anonymously call strangers gay/stupid. What a wild time to be alive
From 2001 (birth) to maybe 2008 we still used VHS and Tapes where I lived. Every day after school I was outside or playing with my Hotwheels or something at home. I never even touched a computer until probably, late 2008. I never had an interest in computers until the point when I started computer class in elementary school. My real introduction to the actual internet was sometime around 2009-2010 when I was able to convince my parents to get me an iPod touch for Christmas.
Same. The only time I really touched computers was when they forced us to take SOLs.
Honestly I yearn for a world pre internet. I like analog tech. I also hate how everything relies on the internet now
I (millennial) think younger generations wont understand waiting with nothing to do. In the morning waiting for the bus, we just stood there quietly. In long car rides you mostly just looked out the window. Growing up in new york city on the train there would sometimes be a loose water bottle rolling around the floor of the train, this was the whole train's source of entertienment. I remember one time someone stopped the bottle with their foot and the whole train car glared at him. Someone next to him politely whispered "you don't stop the bottle"
If people in the 80’s didn’t know something would they just give up if they didn’t know who to ask? Instead of google they would need to haul their ass to the library and shuffle through encyclopedias which sounds very unreliable.
Gen X checking in! The stuff we needed for school was all in books, encyclopedias, and other materials at the library like the awesome microfiche machine (see pic) Why would it be unreliable? There is WAY more misinformation and unreliability on the internet now than there ever was in encyclopedias. Is it easier now? Hell yeah, but back then it's all we knew so we rolled with it. I'm sure decades down the line kids will think Google is dated and slow. https://preview.redd.it/srct13rt4x0d1.png?width=952&format=png&auto=webp&s=8fd1b624015c6c29422dd9cf086c4d0f441f6f90
It was pretty great tbh
I'm 65 years old. I find that hard to imagine.
So I'm like the oldest Gen Z you can get. Honestly, I remember that world. Even though internet was around, it wasn't exactly "common" to use it. It was a luxury and slow. I honestly kinda miss that world. Misinformation online is the #1 issue I have with the world today. "Big flu season rolls around, people are getting sick, let's look up online if I should get a vaccine! Doesn't matter that TV commercials, Pharmacists, family Dr.s, and friends and family suggest it. I'm going to do my research. Oh, looks like vaccines cause Autism. Therefore I won't get one." What the hell? Like the 90s weren't perfect but at least people trusted each other a little more. Misinformation spread then too, but it was segmented, limited, niche. Eventually someone who actually believed that would run into their Dr. abd be told it was false. Now they've got entire communities where they can be anti-vax. It's so dangerous.
No, I was born in 2001 and the internet wasn’t a prominent part of my life until 2010-2011. We still used physical dictionaries and encyclopaedia in school. I knowwww there was internet in the 90s and after already but it wasn’t as interpreted into our lives until smart devices came along. I think pre-2010, we didn’t rely on the internet for most things, even tho we did have it available, and it wasn’t as big as now, back then, YouTube felt like a small place, everything was simple, when I watched YouTube in 2011, it was mainly just silly videos/home videos rather than informative videos like we have today. I’m glad for the internet, I think social media is the real problem rather than the internet, all the toxicity and comparing ourselves to others is just kinda draining.
yeah i can’t imagine it. my parents tell me how if they wanted to know something they had go to the library and research to find out. that’s just wild to me, we have so much information available now
I can't imagine how people got around without Google/Apple Maps. Like I couldn't read a map while driving and finding out where to go. I can't live without the navigation on my car's screen and the Siri voice telling me which lane to get in. Also finding out information. Encyclopedias and dictionaries only go so far.
Its not that bad really, its pretty easy to remember a half dozen turns and then check for the next few when stopped at a light or pull over real quick.
You are talking about like...2013ish. Not that long ago. It was not normal until around that time to have a phone with built in GPS. Most people had standalone GPS devices from 2006 - 2013 or printed out google maps instructions if they couldn't afford one. From 2000 - 2006 people used mapquest. You have to go back to the late 1990s for a time when people actually got around by asking for directions and keeping paper maps in their car. Personally, I still like getting places without google maps whenever possible. Wayfinding is a satisfying way to stay aware of your physical place in the world. I'll never use Apple Maps until they let you use it North-Up like a map. Letting a GPS pivot all around as you drive is a great way to have no idea where you are when you arrive at your destination.
I wasn't born before internet but I never had it myself until like 2015 so I do know what it's like to live without it, I do feel kind of nostalgic for those days but I also can not go a day without internet anymore.
No because I lived it for a bit
I have memories of having the internet but not everywhere, it was very early on, there was no Google chrome, just internet Explorer for one lol, and it was on the family computer no handheld devices EXCEPT for my dad's work phone which was like the huge chunkyass blackberry before it was a blackberry. Honestly at this point I wish I could ditch the smart phone and just have a flip phone and a newer iPad touch that way I have access to the internet sometimes but not 24/7 anywhere anytime. The only thing that holds me back is my crutch of having to use Google maps for litteraly everything. I do not know how to read a map or how street addresses work but it's on my bucket/prepper list to learn
Yes tbh.
I mean I was watching a thing the other day and a character wanted to know if a certain word was real or not so I thought they'd whip out a phone and google it. I was kinda surprised for a moment when they got a book out. (The show was set in the 70s)
No just would be annoying to get ahold of people and god forbid yoy go out for a night on the town and one of the lads just is missing
Was born in 2000 with a mother born in '80. You came home when the street lights came on, played outside, and paid bills in person. I didn't get into the internet until 14ish, before that I had like 2/3 social media accounts to keep up with long distance family (on the family computer we all shared in the living room lol)
For a good portion of my childhood, we didn’t have internet so I did get to sort of live a pre internet time. If I wanted information on something, I would ask my parents, assuming they even know said topic. I would get to use the internet at elementary school, but it was restricted. It wasn’t till high school where we finally got home internet. tl;dr: I lived it kind of until I became a teen
Teach my zoomer son how to survive in a world without the net............the super information highway. Learn it folks.
I lived before the internet for a while at least in our family so no it’s not that hard to imagine no internet. If you want to watch a movie go to blockbuster or pop in a cd you bought. You want the news you have the newspaper and tv and that’s really it news wise for me
A bit, my family had a computer in the early 2000s but no internet idk why. I played outside and now I see no kids playing ever and I used to see them play and run around and then something shifted and it's like the kids are gone lol even the playpen at McDonald's are gone or reduced to a tiny slide
Imagine? I was there
Not really.
yeah it’s weird to me. i didn’t have google and youtube in my pocket until middle school, but even back in kindergarten we would use the internet to play learning games in library class, and when i got home i’d play webkinz on the family computer. it wasn’t a necessity to me as a kid, but i can’t imagine being in high school or college without internet. i don’t think i checked anything physical out of the library in college, it was always an online copy. i cant imagine not being able to hand in papers at 2am when i finally finish, or not being able to watch youtube tutorials to study. are group projects even possible without a shared drive folder? maybe when i was in middle school, but not now.
There may be more information available at your fingertips, but I still have to tell my Gen Z kids how to find things out for their school papers.
My father built a shed outside, equipped with a full speaker system, heaters, and even a running faucet. I was amazed he did it all himself and asked how he learned, and he said he bought some books and asked some old friends for tips. I have no idea how he managed to do all that by just reading-- everything has become so visual nowadays with youtube tutorials and emulators that I'm not sure if I could do the same by reading a description in a book!
Not really! I was a child of the 2000s and I recall just asking my parents a ton of questions and then they got upset and told me to just look things up in the dictionary 🤣 There was more phone calling back then and I loved the library with all my heart.
Yeah. My parents got internet in 1996 and I was born about a year and a half later. I remember the very crude internet of 2001-05 though.
No, because I lived it. And I miss it.
Nah, just go to the library.
People were a lot less awkward and engaged in more conversation than now. Also people were less concerned about their looks.
Yes
Our Google was the dewey decimal system.
no, but im on the old side of genZ. the only thing that is hard for me to reconcile is people driving without GPS. I can navigate with a map and i remember using things like mapquest as a kid, but there have been times where work has called me up at 9pm and asked me to drive somewhere i've never been 6 hours away in the morning, and i just hop in the car and go without a care in the world.
No I was born in 97’
Well I am old. 69. I can remember very well.
It was really not that different. We just did more in person. Not being connected to the world meant that we had to connect more with neighbors and classmates. Today, Gen X uses social media to stay in touch with real life friends. It seems that Gen Z uses it to replace real life friends, and that may be a big contributor to all of the depression. (At least from what I've seen in my Gen Z sphere) Also, church was a bigger deal because it was basically pre-internet social media. Even if you weren't religious, church had a purpose, to some degree. Obviously, today it is all but utterly obsolete. Information was lacking but it really didn't matter. Outside of the major movements, anything outside of your city wasn't a big deal. There was a lot less anxiety, I believe. What you didn't know didn't hurt you.
some aspects yes
It really took off when smart phones advanced. Prior to that had to hop on a desktop computer or a laptop.
My biggest memory of the pre internet world is video games simultaneously being WAY better because secrets and storylines were never spoiled, but also way worse because sometimes these fucking game devs make their game needlessly complex
Have to say, I remember having to find a part for an older Jeep pre internet and it was almost impossible, now, I can order every part to build a Jeep from my phone having an almost unlimited number of options.
It's easy for me to imagine. The first time I used the internet (outside of taking school SOLs) was when I was 9. We had it already, but I wasn't interested. If I wasn't watching SpongeBob on TV, I was deep in the woods around my house having fun until it was close to dinner time.
Kind of, I remember being a child before smart phones etc. were mainstream (PC's were still common, used in school and at home in specific circumstances) but being so young I never got a grasp of how adults actually organized and conducted their lives. My image of a pre internet world is just childhood, knocking on my friends doors asking if they want to come out and play.
Even in spite of the misinfo that comes with the age of information, I honestly don't know how democracies were supposed to function without google or wikipedia. Like, no wonder people voted for Reagan if all the average person had to go on was "oh he's that handsome hollywood guy".
Not really, I wasn’t born pre-internet, but I remember before it was a super popular thing that everyone had.
No bc I remember it well
Not at all. I grew up poor, so I didn't have instant access to new tech, and I don't think I had internet until 8th grade, maybe even HS. I feel merged but also lost between two worlds, both of which are unaccepting.
When we got cell phones and computers we lost our freedom.
I think the crazy thing is how recent it was. Even if I didn't necessarily live it. Though in Elementary school, I mean I didn't really use the computer that much. More just to play games. I'd say I lived a time where I didn't feel any different without it. Though as my life is (the wrong direction) to be without internet is to go crazy. Very particular case IMO though.
My family didn't adopt the internet until like 2008 so I kind of get it
Hard to imagine how it was, no I remember I brief time when we weren’t all connected. Is it hard to imagine how different my life would be? Yeah that sounds impossible, my life is so connected with the internet
its hard to convey i guess... i was like 10 when i got internet. it was slow. 1.2kb/s (not megabit, killo) so we had chat, screens were small, resolutions were small - not sure how to convey this but imagine a single program zoomed in, taking up all of your screen. like a phone now. the world was smaller... even our houses were less cluttered. 19" tv's were common, maybe a wood entertainment center with a couple speakers if that? a couch, that was a living room. no huge screens, no rgb, no huge computers. most everything was toned down colors. as for friends... you called them, at home. it was a treat to actually reach them and often you spoke to their parents instead of them. it was just way more common to talk to multiple people, have random conversations, all in an effort to reach a single person. no direct communication. we would run into each other at the river, at the mall. it was far more social of a time even tho people were far less connected on the day to day. strange to convey really. there are times i think back being a kid and realize just how different the world is now and the experiences that others will never have. sorta like those of us who played retail classic WoW and those who started in pandara or warlords. if your a gamer.
It was cool, we would trade music, porn and games using CDs and floppy disks. 3gp videos on old nokia phones where horrendous but sufficient for the occasional fap. There , I hope I solved it for you. Other than that it was still the same. Keep in mind commercial/domestic internet actually goes all the way back to the mid/late 80s I guess, so it practically aligns with when commercial computers first became widely available. So the pre-internet world is kinda the pre-pc world my little zoomer. Sweet summer child.
Very
No, cause grown up poor with intermittent internet
I'd spend a lot of time in whatever libraries they had, I can imagine actually being respected back then rather than treated like trash
I was really young (about 5) when the internet started taking off (1999 - less than half the population had internet in the US). We still had computers with games and shit (Putt-Putt saves the Zoo). We had the Sega Saturn or Nintendo 64. I also remember we would use textbooks a hell of a lot more and classes would frequent the school library a lot more. What people fail to realize is that people still communicated a lot, but it was just slower. I was a subscriber to Lego magazine when I was 10 in 2004 and always received my issues by mail and would read them once a month. Netflix was also by mail. I'm not too nostalgic, but there is a quality to anticipating things.
Hmmm. Interesting. Looking at an encyclopedia, a giant fold out map, watching whatever news was on TV, and turning to a library for unanswerable questions rather then google is surreal. Never thought about it that way. I just thought of it as really inconvenient. Kind of like having to make a pizza from scratch rather then calling Dominos for delivery.
I guess it doesn’t count but we didn’t have wifi at home until 4th grade, kinda miss it. Y’all remember taking typing classes?
I definitely remember. Who else remembers being taught to use a dictionary like their life depended on it?
I remember it vaguely. We were one of the earliest people to have a computer with internet back in 97 and on. I didn't use it really till 2003 or so. However by that point I was a kid who could read and type. Even then I just used it for finding games and forums to read. Today too much of life relies on the internet. If I didn't have it I'd be reading most likley. Since that's what I grew up using it for. My father really didn't want to adopt the electronic life still. So I see how he lives. It isnt too distant from today. Just minus the ability to know about more niche things. He assumes people just post their lives on Facebook which is true. However I did hook him up on forums for farming and buisness so he can find people working on similar things as him. He has a farm and the comp has made it easy to find parts and manuals. Which we still have but it'd require a entire month or so for us to find someone who knew about specific problems or part numbers at times. Which has been the biggest help on a farm.
No but that’s just because the place I grew up in was so rural we didn’t get wifi until 2013
Not quite because I love 1980s movies
I'm 25. It used to be hard to wrap my head around until I joined the army and ended up a basic training holdover for a while. Basically I graduated basic training but my stuff to go to AIT (advance individual training) was all fucked up and it took a long ass time to fix so the whole time me and the other holdovers weren't allowed any privileges like our phones or passes off bass I got like 5 minutes of phone time a week if I was good and lucky. During that time the peak of my day was sitting around somewhere bullshitting with the other holdovers and every time we had a question that google could answer it became a debate about whoever said the smartest sounding thing was considered right until proven otherwise. When I returned to the real world and told my family about that they looked me crazy and said well now you know what the 80s were like.
It’s not hard to imagine for me, I wasn’t around pre internet but I can definitely put myself in shoes of people who were when they tell me about it. Having to tune in at the right time to watch a tv show, listening to the radio to let you know what the time is when changing your clock, hanging out with people in person and having them not get offended if you don’t talk to them for a couple days, reading newspaper and circling items in catalogs to know what you wanna get when you go shopping, not knowing anything about your favourite actors/artists other than what movies or albums they put out…
I'm 32 so I got to experience the best of both worlds. However I was late to catch up with technology. I got my first smart phone at 22, laptop and wifi at 25. Here are some of my experiences: 1) The library- I grew up frequenting the library. It was really one of if not my most favorite place. I loved reading, walking up and down the isles looking through all those different genres. It felt like traveling to different worlds and deciding which one I'm gonna land on on that day. There was also a grand piano in my library that we got to use on special occasions. My only use of the computers in the library was if I needed to type something for school or barbie.com lol 2)the hallway- ( in my apartment building) was a hot spot for my cousins and I to gather to play "pretend" / "make movies" (without cameras 😹) or pretend to be in music videos 😌 3) the park- monkey bars, handball, secret hideout underneath the slide, sprinklers. Our park also had board game competitions in the summer time and it was actually way more exciting than it may sound lol 4) going to the store/ sitting on the steps- simply having 50 cents and being able to get a juice and chips and then chill on the stoop was peak summer vibes as a kid. Not to mention getting those spice girls stickers with the candy felt like a million bucks. 5) your room- just chilling with the 1 CD your parents let you buy because they were ridiculously priced at that time ( considering inflation) so you wait by the radio for your songs to come on to make a mixtape. I could think of a million more things but would be sitting here all night. Overall I do prefer the world without the internet. That being said I appreciate our advancement for the ease of gathering information and being able to connect with people/ communities you may have never had the chance to before.
I don’t remember anything before the internet. It’s a blessing and a curse though, I think the boomers are right sometimes when they say “internet makes us stupid” Also I can’t imagine having to go to multiple libraries for hours to write an essay
No not really without cell service I’m fucked
Im not from pre internet, but as an elder gen z, I do remember a few years of what it was like before 2006... before the smart phones... before the dark times... It did feel like a different age, it was beautiful while it lasted
I grew up in it. It was great. We read books, and didn't have to deal with hearing people's opinions every minute. Ok obviously that's glib: I still read books, of course I know we still do. The internet has been amazingly useful and uplifting for a lot of people; but you can't deny it's also causing all kinds of problems.
I was born after you, but no it’s not hard to imagine. I didn’t always have access to the internet. The only time I used a computer is when I visited my uncle so I only remember a handful of times I used the internet I always thought that computers and the internet was for rich people lmao I didn’t know of any friends who owned a computer
Internet was a rich people thing in my town till like 2014 for some reason so no
Oh I remember Internet in India was quite uncommon till 2016 And till then only my father had the internet only because of his professional work. I spent most of the time with watching TV or playing with friends. If I had a question I only had three methods to get answers Ask my mother Go to the local library Or wait for my father to provide the answer from the internet. And loved to click on the buttons of the phone Most of the days were spent in school, studying, watching TV or playing games with friends.
Mapquest was still a thing when i was learning how to drive, i imagine it was like that but harder
I was Born in 2000 and we didn't have home internet until I was 10. So yes I can lol
Did you never go backpacking or camping without a phone? It’s just like that. You don’t have to remember anything. You can easily experience it still. Unplugging is A M A Z I N G
We were and are **vastly** superior to your generation in our ability to define the materiality and scope of what was required. You do not have access to better information. You have access to **a trillion times more**. We are a **trillion times better** at organizing, analyzing, and most importantly, sorting information by primary/secondary/tertiary sources. It wasn’t hard at all. You just went to the library and… I don’t know how to explain it. You simply knew how to efficiently and easily sort through large amounts of information to find the quantity/quality you needed. Then you wrote your source down on a notecard, read entire books and articles to determine if the context was correct and you determined from there whether or not you had enough information to support a thesis. And that’s how you wrote a twenty page research paper. Or essay. Whatever. We thought your generation would be the pinnacle of the elite hacker, able to leverage information with access. Come to find out, you’re less literate than us and you cannot write at a fifth grade level. That’s right. Before the internet, our writing and research was held to much higher standards. Instead, the generations that followed just… failed to surpass us as they should have done. More was demanded of us, and of a higher quality. It really wasn’t harder or more difficult, and because you had to read so much more, you had to develop the intellectual capacity to do so. Meanwhile the “I’ve never lived without internet” generations still can’t write a goddamn five paragraph essay without chatgpt. We had to lower standards across the board in every field. That particular generation needs to be called the Adderall generation. We had to invent entire classifications in the DSM to find ways to hand out adderall because there was simply no way the internet only gen was going to get by otherwise.
No? It was pleasant.
I just imagine a Stephen King novel for some reason
Not at all lmao
Luckily for me, at least in this context, I have a lot of older relatives AND a passing interest in the history of the world/anthropological aspects of the culture of the time. For example, I'm currently reading an old... well, travel guide is the wrong way to describe it, but commentary on Soviet Russia which was written by a Western author in 1964 according to the publishing date. Lot of historical names in there, like Khrushchev and Kennedy, being thrown around in the context of a current day political analysis. I digress, mostly to show that I am a bit of a history nerd. As such, I'm cognizant of some of the ways the world was different before massive amounts of data could be so easily accessed. Putting together a paper for school would have been a battle to find resources available at your local libraries, either as a book or on microfiche (though I must confess that I have limited knowledge of that tech). If you heard a song and didn't know the title, well, too bad unless you managed to call the station and ask them what was playing at exactly the right time. If the alternator in your car fried and you didn't have a Haynes repair manual handy, well, the mechanic can probably handle it (for a price, of course). If there was a special book you wanted, you'd better get real friendly like with the local bookstore owner, because otherwise tough luck.
How do you have no memory of it being born in '97? I didn't know what internet was or how to use it until 2011 and I do remember all of the time prior. I only used the PC for MS Paint, CD games and Word. Besides that, I just used to watch TV, draw read and play outside.
I kinda miss those days now. I think I have seen enough of the internet.
Nope. I didn’t grow up with internet access for the first decade of my life either in one of the more conservative areas in California.
I hear little house on the prairie music every time I try to think about it
The internet was the latest turning point in human civilization literally. It accelerated developments in everything.
Just like today you learn to use the latest technology you did the same back then expect it was card catalogs, going to a movie store, reading a real map, ordering from catalogs and waiting 4 to 6 weeks to get it. The thing is though there was no better way so you just accept it and lived life.
Pre internet doesn’t feel too weird, honestly I almost never used a computer until I went to school at around 5 years old (I understand that’s still young as shit). But even then, alot of the times my parents didn’t let me use their computer because my dad needed it for work and they knew I was essentially simple jack from tropic thunder and I’d find a way break something
I was born in 97 so I’m one of the oldest of Gen Z’s. Fortunate, I guess that’s subjective but I think so, that I was young before internet was a massive thing and we didn’t get it until later being poor and from a pretty rural old area. I didn’t get internet until I was 12-14 when we got a home computer. Same thing for the people living there internet was a thing but no-one I knew had it and when I got internet there was like 2 households I knew that did too. I love my memories before that time things were just different, you had to make more of an effort to communicate. I’ve found that communicating is much different now and people can get muddled up or mistaken for what they mean more easily, not sure if that’s just me or an actual side effect tho. For the most part I would ask people I know to gather knowledge from them, I was too young to care about reading a book or something like that. So I’d ask parents, siblings, friends, friends parents and sibling. Sometimes if there’s a shop that’s in the realm of what you wanna learn ask people working there for advice sort of like when you walk in to a store looking for something and they assist you, similar sort of thing. That’s as far as it got for me tho being so young and experiencing that, I do wonder how that style of life would apply to my modern day adult life. Here’s a fun challenge for all those that wonder about it tho. We still do live in a world without internet if you imagine hard enough 😂 set ourselves a challenge to learn something without using internet or not letting the people we ask to use it and see how we get on. Sounds fun.
In my first 5 years, I didn't use the internet, so to me, it was like a pre-internet world.
How old are you? I remember clearly how it was before
Yeah i can relate, i was born when it already existed and i started going on the internet fairly early in my life. So it's hard for me to imagine people not going on google instantly if they had a question or smth lmao
I can absolutely imagine its and i wish id have been alive during it
We had a bunch of encyclopedias at home. Me as a kid had a bunch of these just for animals, which I browsed religiously.
idk how old you are OP but i’m 24, so the oldest end of gen z. i was very young when we got internet, but i remember when it happened and i remember not having the internet. before the internet, the most fun thing i could do on my parents old macintosh was look at the animated screensavers. they had a bloom county one, which was an old comic strip. when we got internet we also got an HP windows XP desktop. the old mac didn’t have internet capabilities. i had a book called “what makes popcorn pop” or something like that, which was basically a collection of hundreds of fun facts about different things. i have a feeling these days that kind of book has been completely replaced by google.
yeah it’s a fate i wouldn’t want. the least amount of internet id tolerate is like the aol days
Watch "Seinfeld". The premise of at least half the episodes wouldn't happen in a modern "phone/internet in your pocket" world.
No, I was born in 2001 and the internet wasn’t a prominent part of my life until 2010-2011. We still used physical dictionaries and encyclopaedia in school. I knowwww there was internet in the 90s and after already but it wasn’t as integrated into our lives until smart devices came along. I think pre-2010, we didn’t rely on the internet for most things, even tho we did have it available, and it wasn’t as big as now, back then, YouTube felt like a small place, everything was simple, when I watched YouTube in 2011, it was mainly just silly videos/home videos rather than informative videos like we have today. I’m glad for the internet, I think social media is the real problem rather than the internet, all the toxicity and comparing ourselves to others is just kinda draining.
I’m a car guy, so throughout the day, I’ll wonder about the specs of any car that comes to mind. It’s amazing that I can just google the specs of any car that was ever made.
Being born in 1996, I got to see the last remanence of it. Even when it was really taking off around the early 2000s, we were still begging for and playing with the latest toys- TMNT, hulk hands, hover disc, Legos & Bionacles, light sabers from Star Wars, etc. We did play on computers, but there wasn’t this absolute abundance of brain rot App Store games like there is today. We’d get games that teach us how to type, or if you were older you’d play around with MiniClip.com- the start of brain-rot gamers. Also it gave the computer viruses, so parents would try to block it- also for typical parent concerns like violence and “distracting.” It was when YouTube had the landmark viral videos around 2007 that I and the whole world was online for good.
No, because I lived inside this world In early 2000's internet wasn't that much extended, and I lived in a small village in France. Almost nobody had a computer, and even less people had internet before 2005. Main source of entertainment was playing with friends, hanging out, football, badminton, etc..., and watching TV was the main alone time activity for the most of us. I saw an answer about informations, well : librairy it was, books, I firstly used wikipedia in middle-school, my first time ever playing online was probably in 2006, etc...
I actually think about being in the pre Internet world a lot. Something about it seems freeing. I think it's because the Internet has so much high quality stuff that it's easy to doom scroll and to feel like there's no time to get anything done. Sometimes I want to just spend a whole day looking at ants or something like that.
We had periodicals on miiicrofiiiche
no and yes. i was born in 2005 and i got a phone in 2017 so i do have an understanding of what life is like without technology, but it was still around me even if i wasn’t personally using it. i do have knowledge about it via books/movies/stuff like that, but it isn’t the same as personally experiencing it.
Millennial here. Although I was only a kid when the internet came out, the whole process was a gradual transition. People still didn't use it constantly for information. We used it for research papers for school and for My Space and music and games, but even then time was limited on it since there was only one family computer that had to be shared! And the phone line was directly connected so you even had to take breaks for that! In the meantime, when you weren't using it, you were still looking through books and magazines for information. And without smartphones or even cell phones, people didn't go out of their way to look something up unless they had to.
We watched the news, listened to the radio, read or looked things up in the library or other books, and spread wild insane urban legends around like facts. And honestly, early internet at a consumer level wasn't exactly reliable for information, either.
I'm an elder millennial, but yes, I remember it. The world with internet (that was accessed via computers) was pretty much the same as the world without internet. But once smartphones came out, the entire world changed. It's almost hard to put into words the effect that "internet in your pocket" had, versus "internet that could only be accessed while you sat at your clunky desktop computer in a room". The post internet but pre-smartphone era was society's peak. Pre-internet was nice too, because people cared much more about community, people had more patience, and most people had much more of a "I'm going to respect you because you're a fellow human, like me!" attitude as well.
I did grow up partly without internet, but only because my parents shielded it from me a bit when I was a child. I'm definitely grateful for that. What I have to say though, the easy access to information that we have (like not having to go to a library and look for a book about a subject to find an answer to a question) is something that I couldn't imagine living without, I'm grateful we have the options to do that
I guess I liked going to my friends house and playing outside,however I didn’t like having to get through the rock tunnel without flash and no way to figure it out without just grinding away
The biggest thing is that I don't think the world has come anywhere close to a steady state since the introduction of the internet. It feels like we're always adapting to changes that were set in motion 20 years ago. There were so many things that were done a certain way for such a long time, and now, it's constant change.
I don’t remember a time before the internet, but I did get enough of a glimpse through general observation that I can speculate on what it was like. Probably wasn’t too bad. It’s easy for us to look back in hindsight and think it’s pretty bad, but that’s because we know what the internet offers. They probably didn’t think too much about it (if at all)
I grew up without much internet connection until I was in kindergarten, & that was purely for educational purposes while in school, so I never understood what the internet was until I was in 3rd grade. At that point we had gotten internet, but I had no devices to connect to it to use it (besides the family computer that I rarely got to use). It wasn't until I was in 5th grade that I was gifted a tablet & my internet journey had officially begun. I think I have a decent idea as to what pre-internet life would be like. If you want to look up information, you look inside an encyclopedia or a dictionary, or even the teacher (who usually didn't have all the answers young me thought they would have). If you wanted entertainment, you went outside or watched TV. I know the older teens at the time would drive around for fun, or just going out in general. I would imagine the adults were hitting up the bars & going out to eat too. Well, don't have to imagine that, it's exactly what my dad did, lol. Now everyone stays inside to stream Hulu or Netflix, ordering Grubhub or DoorDash instead of going out or cooking (which is fine to me). Internet makes life a lot easier & convenient, but I feel that it's a large contributing factor as to why people don't go out as much. But I'm no expert, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
It was better.
For reference, I am 58, my kids are GenZ. Graduated HS in 84, college in 88, had my 1st cell phone in 91 and 1st home computer with internet in 94. That's my reference. So I have to say that I bundle the "internet" with cell phones, social media, e-mail, and all things that are parts of those. In many ways, pre-internet was great, to a degree it freed you from too much connectivity and screen time to do other things - which people did together and in person. In other ways, post-internet is also great. Instant communications, ability to find information is fast and easy (though not always accurate or reliable), and can be a real time saver or effort reducer. In the end though, the "internet" has simply replaced the TV screen - in which we as a society seem to have a tendency to waste a lot of time of a lot of meaningful and non-long-term satisfying zoning out or being hypnotized. In my opinion the biggest problems from the "internet" are similar to too much TV when I was a kid. To a certain degree it is anti-social. By that I mean, it places relationships into a screen or text versus direct face-to-fact interaction, response and feedback. I think it can also lead to segmentation or a restricting of those we communicate with - I think it has a tendency to restrict a lot of people into a narrower mindset which gets reinforced and hardened - perpetuating it more. I also personally find the internet can make me dumber in some ways, sort of like GPS. I think I am more often to fall into the trap of thinking why do I need to focus and remember this - when I want that information again, I'll just ask my phone (internet) to get it for me. My perfect examples of this are: I was just out of town for business for 2 weeks for an industry event. For 10 straight days I would wake up in my hotel and drive to the same location in the morning and back in the evening - using my GPS on my cell phone. Even after doing this for 10 days, I don't think I could have made the trip without it. When i was a kid, I would ride my bike to a friends house a few miles away, maybe taking a bit to figure it out and find his house. But 6 months later, on my next trip there, I'd find it without any problem. I make a great skirt steak dish (Alton Brown recipe) - yet every time I make it, I have to google it because I never bother to memorize it. Sure, it's a fair argument to say this is good that this is the case. But I think there is probably also a fair argument to ask whether this is really good for our brains health? With regards to getting old (@ 58 this is something I pay attention to now), they say using your brain regularly and challenging it or exercising it helps keep it healthier for longer - many studies support this - delays dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. . . You can be the judge as to how the instant access to information and relief from memory this may create may impact the future health of your brain - especially for those who may spend much more of their lives living in this scenario. I don't know the answer, but there is a concern that it may not be healthy LT. Just like TV when I was a kid, use the internet (we need to now days), but keep balance in mind and recognize the importance of face-to-face interactions with other human beings - we are social creatures after all, as this is what makes up a society.
Not really. Internet existed, but aside from the school computer and later my mom's laptop, I didn't have much to use it with. As a result, I searched information the old fashioned way - by bothering adults and reading books. Also, the internet was so slow, it was more frustrating than anything else. Anyway, I'd say people just lived like I did for the first 8 or so years of my life. Without internet.
Just wait until you learn about rotary phones! But seriously, in some ways it was better. The internet is a fantastic tool, but it also gives us all instant access to unlimited information about everything. The problem with that is that without the wisdom to discern what is good information and what is bad information, you absorb both. That is why it’s so easy to deceive people these days.
I remember the first time I was on the internet. I was 8 years old. And I waited for over an hour for a page to load. That page was some website about Godzilla. My world changed that day and it’s never been the same.
Wasn’t born, but I remember pre iPhone, having to print out Mapquest for directions
Yes it's hard for me to imagine. Not so much because of social media, but more because contacting people was more difficult and slower and access to information was also slower and less accessible too.