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

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

#31

Post by neogodless »

Mobile phones gave us information about our friends right now.

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

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

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

#32

Post by HarryHirsch »

danielrhodes wrote: post #29

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

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

Sound familiar, no?

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

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

#33

Post by dabeeeenster »

jpatokal wrote: post #30
dabeeeenster wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to know if the parent poster was alive before the internet was available to consumers? It's hard to get over just how isolated information was before the internet. If you missed a sports score, for example, unless you heard the result fortuitously, you had to wait and read it in the newspaper the next day . CAN YOU IMAGINE? If you wanted to know something relatively obscure, you had to travel to a library and…

Yes, I was, see another reply below. "The Internet" in the pre-Web form I first encountered it was quite different from what you describe, and close to useless at answering your questions. Also, Teletext was a thing, and it solved the "missing news" problem pretty well, as did TV and radio.

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

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

#34

Post by dghughes »

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

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

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

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

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

#35

Post by maxerickson »

hobs wrote: post #28
tgarma1234 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely remember using the phone at the bar I used to hang out at to call home to check my messages on my answering machine to find out where everyone else was planning to be. Or just walking around to familiar places to see if anyone was around. Life was a ton better living that way honestly. People were certainly more real. Now whenever I am around people I find they are compulsively checking their phones for…

Yeah the picture thing frustrates me, my parents used to have a photo drawer and albums with all the important stuff, now its just facebook. I remember her talking about them as if they were the one thing she would save in a fire, but I doubt she has ever looked at an old facebook photo more than once.

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

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

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

#36

Post by aluhut »

eli wrote: post #21
aluhut wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

A brave doubt on hn.

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

#37

Post by falcolas »

kyriakos wrote: post #20

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

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

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

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

#40

Post by dghughes »

tinco wrote: post #9
jpatokal wrote: post #2

I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything , and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap. As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they…

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

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

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

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

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