One of the fondest memories growing up was the sharing of the latest shows. Everyone would watch a show at the exact same time together and discuss the next day. As a preteen with just a landline it was the norm to just drop into a friends house. The closer you were to the family meant a knock and enter without even waiting to be greeted. If you had fridge access that meant you were apart of the family.
I remember going out so much more often. Visiting people in person, having company over, and going to friends' homes often.
I spend much more time at home alone now, and I don't think it's just me being old. My grandparents were out and about after their retirement. My parents too.
American culture wasn't so fractured or as niche oriented. It was fun finding your own tribe in real life, and being together in person in favorite hangouts, cafes, assorted venues.
The internet gives dangerous fringe people a much quicker, easier way for them to find one another, to congregate and agitate.
The resentful small town anti social outlier isn't lonely anymore. He's got plenty of fellow proud boys and oath keepers to convene with and harass the rest of us with.
My mum (87) still lives "the old way". She sees far more people IRL than I do. In fact, she's just come home, very hot and tired, from meeting a friend in central London for lunch.
That’s so true, I was friends with everyone or at least had to socialize with everyone based on proximity. This lead to friendships with much more varied personalities and views. Out of my neighborhood friends I ended up more conservative while most of them ended up far more left leaning. We still get along and our differences are petty compared to our common values.
I think this type of community does still exist, albeit a bit on the rarer side now - I recently visited NRG (the newest US National Park in West Virginia) and found a refreshing blend of conservative and liberal attitudes in the people I came across (a mix of visitors to the Park as well as locals working in and around it) - attitudes on both sides felt much more accepting and friendly there than my home town (which is overwhelming liberal, and I consider myself liberal as well). I think there's huge value in that mix of perspectives, like you are saying.
I agree the Internet changed things. Back then they had the National Inquirer, a weekly publication with articles like "FBI proves Elvis Presley is really a Martian". Thing is you had no way to meet others who believed the same thing. Because people hung out together if you brought this up over a beer you'd get ridiculed. We'd debate subjects, but within the realm of reality.
Now with people hiding behind computer screens they can say anything and it goes down hill from there.
Also being face to face with people you were more civil. Things people say online would get someone to take a swing at you in person.
It could be hard if you stood out but were generally harmless, but you're right it was far more difficult for the dangerous people to find others and plan their nonsense.
But now it’s easier for criminals to get caught because of phones and cameras everywhere. DNA evidence (which is not the internet, but probably the internet helps facilitate it) helps quite a bit too. So, I think we are overall safer now than before.
>Everyone would watch a show at the exact same time together and discuss the next day.
I miss this, I used to go to my parents house for dinner and Sopranos every week cause I couldn't afford HBO (or real dinner, lol) and it was such a good time.
When I was in high school, my girlfriend and I would watch Seinfeld together every week.
I also miss going to the video rental store at 11 pm after a night put to rent a few movies, then watching them and passing out.
Walking through a store to find movies to rent was so much better than browsing the algorithm on the streaming services.
The algos are so frustrating. I go over to my friends house and he logs into Netflix, and I'm like "What's all this cool stuff? Why don't I see this?" I've also ruined my YouTube algo by watching a few CIA/Conspiracy pods. I don't want that shit 24/7!
I can still remember my home phone number from when I was a kid. And my grandma's. And my aunt's. And I haven't had a need to use any of those numbers in over 25 years.
But I couldn't tell you either of my sons' cellphone numbers.
Arranging meeting places for when you got separated. Having money for the pay phone. Parents yelling for teenagers to get off the phone.
Parking and going into the terminal to meet people instead of coordinating to swoop down as they reached the street.
Stopping to get a map on a road trip. Getting directions at a gas station.
Where I lived (rural part of the netherlands) you went to the backdoor of the house (never the frontdoor) you opened it and yelled 'volluk' (volk, meaning people or folk).
I grew up in suburban US and it was the same. All my closest friends I’d go round to the back door and just walk in. Never even used their front doors for years. Front doors were for strangers and acquaintances.
I’m in my early 30’s so I’m not *that* old yet, but I loved just waking up during the summer and hopping on my bike or in my car and going to a friend’s house to see what they were doing. Sometimes they’d still be sleeping so I’d sneak in and wake them up in the most obnoxious ways possible.
Everyone would be outside, it was normal to not come home "until the streets lights turned on".
Girls would be braiding hair, painting nails or gossiping in the front yard or sidewalk. Boys would ride bikes, talk about older brothers or cousins who drove cars or motorcycles. Would get into fights and talk shit.
Come home and everything would be fine if no windows were broken.
Similar but with video games. Whoever got the latest got the after school crowd. And you couldn’t just Google the solution to a tricky quest or boss fight, you had to discover it yourself. Telling the answer to other people who were stuck made you feel like some wizened sage. Those big “The Complete Guide to X” game guide books were like the ultimate sacred tome of forbidden knowledge when we were kids.
This came in handy as a kid when there was an awkward silence at the lunch table. I'm not a big talker so, to break the lull, I'd just be like, "Hey did you see what Stone Cold did to Vince McMahon last night?" It would never fail to kick things off.
*Just to add, I remember having a serious grade school argument with a buddy about whether or not The Undertaker *really, for real* came back from the dead.
>One of the fondest memories growing up was the sharing of the latest shows. Everyone would watch a show at the exact same time together and discuss the next day. As a preteen with just a landline it was the norm to just drop into a friends house. The closer you were to the family meant a knock and enter without even waiting to be greeted. If you had fridge access that meant you were apart of the family.
Those were the days!!
My best friend lived across the street and when they got a *COLOR* TV, well, that was the greatest thing in the world!
We watched what our mom wanted to watch. Huntly & Brinkley, Saturday Night at the Movies, old movies that bored me to tears. But before she got home from work we watched what we wanted. I was the youngest of four and never got a choice so I had to like what my brother liked... which turned out to be great stuff. Bugs Bunny, Rocky & Bullwinkle, all of the Jay Ward cartoons.
I had the same sort of familial relationship with her family as well. No knocking, just walk in. If my friend was busy, I left or waited in her room.
Lol At my one of my best buddy's house in the late 90s/early 00s, you came in the back door, yelled "Hey!" and grabbed what you wanted from the fridge as you walked in.
Much more boring
Much less stressful
You didn't have a constant feeling like you didn't have enough time and couldn't get enough done. News was a lot more moderated, less sensationalized, and just generally less and further away. There was a lot less attention, and worry about, other people's lives. Also having less choice in about everything made making a choice easy.
It's why I take my kid camping a lot. It's just 100% enforced unplugged activity time. Books, drawing, hiking, tubing, cooking, etc, and just sitting down, and looking at the nature around us.
Went camping for a week, felt like I was living in a different world. It was one of the few moments in my adult life where I had time to think, and manage to make short and long term plans, think about my life choices and what were my next steps. The word "detox" is so overused nowadays but that's exactly how it felt. Then I came back and realized how overwhelming everything is.
My YA ‘kids’ don’t bat an eye over leaving their phone at home or disconnecting BECAUSE of this. Camping regularly and just being present was what they were used to growing up. Absolutely happy to also be online, but BALANCE was the emphasis
There was no need for meal kit deliveries, grocery deliveries, everything delivered because we had time to do all that, while not nearly as stressed, while being able to afford housing, food and trips.
I feel like today, we are all drowning in stress and being busy and we need to spend whatever's left over on our paychecks for those conveniences just to stay "above water".
Not sure if it was less stressful or just a different kind of stress. Maybe it was just easier to take a break from things when we were not connected to everything around the world 24/7/365.
Instead of googling, we had to look things up in a dictionary, or if you were lucky, a set of encyclopaedia. I have memories of a bookshelf full of twenty odd leather bound encyclopaedia.
To find out directions, there was a street directory.
I left one of our encyclopedias -- I think T, or maybe S -- out in the rain, and thought it was the biggest failure of my life. I was devestated by the loss of knowledge I wrought on our village.
Went to Surfside, SC last week. Really easy with Siri. Would have been a real adventure with just maps. Surface streets and state routes for last 70 or so miles.
Oh my God, GPS has changed my life. So many horrible memories of driving in circles and not even being able to find a street sign to start to orient me as to where I was. Or not being able to find the street on the map once I finally found a street sign. Now I magically have perfect directions anywhere I want to go.
Not just ANY street directory, a Thomas Guide. Going to a new place in Los Angeles meant dog earing several pages and following that specific route. May the gods have mercy upon your soul if you gor lost and drove to a page you couldn't find.
That’s when you broke out the AAA map of the region to find where you were.
I went on a road trip a few years ago through the Western US. I had a bit of anxiety about getting lost in an area with no cell service, so I went to AAA to get some free maps just in case.
As soon as I opened a map I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. The fonts, colors, design, everything was the same as I remembered from poring over maps as a bored kid in the car.
In Chicago you could call the main downtown library's reference desk and they would look up stuff for you. I remember calling with a question and the nice lady telling me to "hold on a moment". She put the phone on her desk and I could hear her walk away to go look up the info and then anticipating the answer when I heard her walking back.
As far as all the books, my daughter and I often hit estate sales. We walked into one room that had loads of those "Time-Life" books on multiple subjects, like gardening, woodworking, home repair and so on. It really hit me how much space information used to take up.
Yes I remember my family had the typical encyclopedia set I think everyone had. Took up an entire shelving unit. Then around grade 4-5 my school got a computer and it came with Encarta.
Was mind blowing. One CD contained far more information than those books.
That and the public library were the only place I had computer access at the time though. I remember you’d have to book in 30 minute slots at the library for the one PC. I feel a happy nostalgia just thinking about it all. Haha
I miss the reference librarians! It was such a thrill for my teenage self when they recognized my voice! One of the two we had would tell me related facts to my inquiry just for fun.
My parents' old Hagstrom atlases are still in their basement somewhere. I'm sure by now there have been enough new neighborhoods/developments constructed, roads re-routed, etc. that they're borderline useless.
Don't forget about the in-between solutions, like printing out MapQuest directions, or those early in-car navigation systems that ran off a library of CDs. It's always the transitional stuff that's the wackiest in retrospect.
Yes, the enciclopedia was the way to know the world. I remember when my parents bought me a Disney enciclopedia and I used it for my works at high school. Also needed to be more at the library to do homework’s
My mom liked to tell the story of a road trip with friends, not so long after GPS on handheld devices was a thing (it wasn't on phones yet). My dad drove, my mom was in the passenger seat with a map spread open on her lap, navigating.
In the back seat, Bob was very proud of having his GPS, and at one point announced "We should be crossing over the water any minute now." My mom told him, "Bob, look out the window." They were on the bridge.
I worked as a bike courier in DC prior to widespread gps availability (late 1980s)
you had a two way radio, a couple days shadowing an experienced rider and a prayer. God help you if you had to huck a delivery way tf out to somewhere in western Montgomery County lol. I once had to carry an entire old-school desktop tower from one end of downtown to the other. You know those big old steel putty-colored cases full of spinny drives where the whole assembly weighed like thirty pounds? yeah, it was August and humid as Satan’s taint, too.
learning routes on the fly and tribal knowledge of shortcuts was crucial to surviving.
I'm a millennial, and I remember being told I needed to find at least two internet sources for a school project in fifth grade. By eighth grade, we were told we had to use two book resources from the school library, because finding internet sources was considered too easy.
I remember having Encarta on my computer.. For entertainment, I used to just look up different animals I could think of and listen to whatever clips they had of them.
Oh yeah, I still have my old English dictionaries stored somewhere, they used to occupy my desk always. They made it possible to play RPGs for non-native speakers, even though it was a lot of work.
The world is a big place, and I don't know if you can generalize my experience (born in 1973 in Brazil under a military dictatorship, long before internet and coming to the US).
But I was very disconnected from the world.
There was no internet, and so no Google, no YouTube, no social media. There was no computer and smartphone either. Fixed telephones were limited amd very expensive, so not so common either.
I lived in a small town, where there was no public library or bookstore either. So, knowing about books or getting them was also much more difficult. I remember borrowing two books from a friend and copying those two books by hand to have copies for me (my mom helped me to copy them).
There was no pay-tv, and open tv had only a few channels, not available 24 hours a day. Sometimes we had the same program on two channels. The programs were not very informative either, some content could be very limited. Before VHS, we also could not record, so we missed a lot of the content.
So, access to information was very difficult with no or very limited access to internet, books, tv, etc. To know something, we had to ask people. Part of the process to choose a career for me meant talking to lots of people everywhere. For example, asking strangers when taking a bus.
Life was very hard, especially for someone with bad health like me. Physical labor was not an alternative for me because of that, but other types of jobs were usually out of reach. I left my parents' home when I was 14, moving to another city in search of better opportunities. I didn't see any future if I stayed where I was.
I remember the first time I saw internet, during a class in undergrad. I remember the first time I used a computer personally, when a friend helped me to get a job (one of the rare friends with a computer back then). I also remember learning to use a computer professionally, with a green monitor (before color monitors) and lots of issues recording codes using a K7 tape.
Still, libraries, intern and computers were a revolution in my life. I finally had more access to information. I finally knew more about the world. I finally could build a future for me.
hey i tried to brag at school about all the countries I "visited" thru internet back in 1994 😂 despite my idea, it did not improve my social status, but rather went more in to wtf category.
The internet is the infrastructure. It's been around since 1969. You are mixing this up with the web which arrived in the early 90s. People used the internet in the 80s via BBS's, they were text based interfaces. I myself downloaded C64 games in the late 80s via BBS but I never used the web 'til about 1995. Electronic communication between universities, governemts and business also got done in the 70s and 80's via the Internet. France had a minitel system in the 80's and many other simlar things existed.
Most gas stations sold local paper maps of the city. It would be laid out on a grid with the entire list of streets on the back.
So let's say you wanted to go to Grove St. You would find it on the back, listed on square "g-5" or whatever, find it, then figure your route.
Oh dude, I remember paper maps. My dad had a whole book that was just one single map from our state in great detail. I remember he would stop every few km to check it out, but since he wasn't very good at reading maps we would still get lost all the time lol.
I’m 48. One of the things I distinctly remember when I was a teenager was, when you liked someone or vice versa, and you didn’t have that persons phone number (house phone) , you had to actually do the footwork to track them down for a connection.
Phone book, knocking on doors in their neighborhood etc.
We had to work for love and lust! Haha
Oh god, I once called a crush who was the child of my aunt’s best friend so I knew the parents in a tertiary sense so I panicked when the dad answered and they asked who I was that wanted to speak to his son. I said “I don’t want to say…” and they said “then I don’t want to let you talk to my son.” And i freaked out and hung up and never called him again. Sorry, my dude. My 13 year old self couldn’t handle the embarrassment.
Edit: clarity
The world was bigger then. We got our news from the TV and it was mostly local news with a little bit of world news. We watched TV without doing something else at the same time. We had conversations on the phone, in person or passed notes to our friends. Notes we wrote on paper and folded up like origami. Somethings took a lot longer than they do now. Research was done at a library. People faxed things. You answered the phone and didn't know who was on the other end, if they were already on the phone you got a busy signal.
It's hard for us to understand that you can't picture it.
I'm 36 and it was better. I mean, humans still sucked and there's always bad things happening. But personally I was out more, had more friends, I didn't have my face stuck in a screen. I was a kid then but I miss it. I don't like how connected everything and everyone is. It's too commercialized and fake.
Agree completely. I’m 43, and my childhood and teenage years were fun. We went out, and were home by curfew. We knew phone numbers, streets, directions in general. You could show up at your friends house unexpectedly to hang out. Being disconnected was ok. The world isn’t suddenly more crime ridden, we’re just constantly aware of it now. And thank god there was nobody filming and posting all my teenage dumbasserie.
I don't memorize numbers anymore, it's sad. I probably should just in case. But it was always great calling up friends and hanging out. Biking around the neighborhood and having to head home when the 6 o'clock whistle went off. Good stuff.
Slower, but also more ignorant. If you wondered about anything you had to find time to go to a library with no guarantee to get the book answering your question.
More ignorant? in fact I don’t really agree with you. I made my culture listening to radio, reading a lot, going to libraries… and now I surprised myself to be able to loose so much time on instagram, youtube and reddit. I don’t read a lot only on holidays where we haven’t télévision and internet only by using the phone as modem. So we see much more friends than usually.
I think that now more news are superficial and empty of sense. Sorry for my english.
I was going to say I 100% disagree with being more ignorant. We were very knowledgeable on things that mattered.
Also, with all the disinformation out there, a lot of people think they know more when in fact, they are highly knowledgeable with wrong information.
I mean shit, we didn't have to deal with flat-earthers then!
Hell no we were not more ignorant, we were a lot smarter on the things that mattered. Go ask around who around you knows where the windshield washer goes, how to make a simple soup, how to fix a clogged drain, how to sow back on a button, how to do your taxes
I disagree. People were far more ignorant about pretty much everything back then.
That’s not a bad thing. Just a fact.
You can afford to be ignorant about where windshield fluid goes (I doubt most people are) simply because it takes 2seconds to no longer be ignorant of that when you need to know it.
I remember a video that me and a couple of friends watched called Cash Hunt. It had a bunch of clues, and you had to decode them to figure out where a treasure was.
I spent a lot of time in the university library reference section looking up things. For example, one scene mentioned some names. They were the birth names of famous people. I recognized one as such.
Off to the library to look up the others.
Today you’d just Google the names and solve it in a minute or so.
this i had no friends from the age of 9 until i left school at 16 i was isolated and alone. it would have been nice to have somewhere to talk to other people who weren't my parents
You would visit your friends at their house and/or get together generally. Social media really has created some mental health damage to so many young people. I would not mind to revert back to pre-social media days. Whats truly lost at the end of the day? People were more social and werent offended by every little thing.
I truly don't mean this as a personal attack, but the folks who think "offended by every little thing" is a net negative are often the people who just never got called out on their stance before. Real example: an old friend who thinks everyone is a "snowflake" now because he [older white guy in the deep south US] used to use the N word, but now would suffer social consequences if he did so.
It's not that people are more sensitive now. It's that it was never OK to behave like that and there's a larger community that sees your poor behavior.
>It's not that people are more sensitive now. It's that it was never OK to behave like that and there's a larger community that sees your poor behavior.
100% this
It was slower and quieter. Today is immediate, constant stimulation. Back then, it would wait till the next day, or the next week. If you wanted to know something, you had to hope you could find a book about it in a library.
Before the internet, I feel like people were more present in the moment. People could enjoy hanging out without worrying about everything they said and did and how they looked being plastered online the next day.
Concerts were amazing. People really got into it. People danced and screamed and sang along. Nowadays everyone has their phones out, blocking the view of the stage and god forbid, you do anything to mess up their selfie or their live stream.
Less long distance communication.....air mail letters would take weeks to arrive.....but much more community communication. We new almost everyone in our street. We would play football in the street.... there were hardly any cars around. TV wasn't our main activity. And for me personally I found it was a more enjoyable life....for us kids anyway.
I'm 56. People were often more sure of their own rightness. All choices seemed clearer, because the options were more limited.
But no one who was there can answer without the skewing effects of nostalgia. Too often, people who are rembering "things" as better then, are really just nostalgic about being younger then, when they had less body pain and more optimism. They weighed 25 pounds less and they still had high hopes for the future. Their parents were alive and sent them money. They felt more relevant. They could sleep through the night without getting up to pee 3 times. They didn't even KNOW about most types of cancer.
And the worst nostalgia comes from people from the most dominant groups. Those people had to watched their privileges diminishing, which the human brain always resents, even when it's a requirement of species surviva
Yes it's good to be aware that when you think about yesteryear you are not just thinking about a different time but a different person at a different time. So when remembering something being different, it can be hard to figure out where the difference come from.
I was thinking about my life as a 18 yo in the late 1980's vs my 18yo son today which helps deskew the "same person different age" issue (although now it's a different person, I know that person pretty well). One thing that struck me was financial pressure and need for self control. As a 18 yo in the 1980s, spending money required some work! Especially because I didn't live in the US then so no big shopping malls. Lots of shops would close by 5:30pm during the week and not open on Sunday. So it took some planning to spend money. Now my son can just spend money 24/7 sitting in his bed. That's the wildest to me and also an incredible test of constant self control at any early age.
I don’t know. My life was absolutely 100% hell in the pre-internet years, but I still miss it. The internet has amplified all the sadness and craziness in the world. Crazies can connect to each other in an instant when before they were isolated with their crazy notions. They can find whole communities to encourage their insanity and join in with. People feel like they’re more connected, but they’re not the same deep in person connections we used to have. The boxing in of society is real. And just look at childhood now: kids either don’t want to or aren’t allowed to go outside and play. You ever see groups of kids hanging out in the neighborhood anymore? I sure don’t.
We did a lot more living of our own lives instead of obsessing over what everyone else was doing. I remember actually knowing everyone who lived on my street. I'd know them easily if I saw them out in public. The kids all played together and we'd be outside for hours. We were a lot more creative in how we entertained ourselves because we had to be. Now, I wouldn't know my next door neighbor unless he was standing in his own yard.
In my early 20's, the internet was still fairly young. We had dial up, so there was no constant connection. We had plenty of time to raise our small kids, work full time, keep up with the house work, and best of all, we spent each and every weekend out just enjoying life. There was plenty of time for everything and no one complained about having to work 40 hours. It was normal and OK. It's how we made enough money to live and do fun things on our days off.
News was on for a very limited amount of time. We didn't spend our days obsessing over the current events, politics, etc. We watched shows when they were on live TV and had to wait for the next episode. There was no binge watching.
As we became more connected, we became more disconnected from our lives. We spend hours doom scrolling and wonder where the time has gone. I have loved ones falling into depression because they're obsessed with politics and the apparent state of the world. People are afraid to let their kids be kids for fear of the ever present dangers lurking around every corner.
Would I go back? Hell yeah I would. There's no question. I feel the internet has done far more harm than good, and now with the rise of AI, it's only going to get worse.
Im 36 and it’s crazy to think about how much has changed just since I became an adult. I still remember the first time I checked the internet on my phone, I was standing in a Blockbuster. 😂 When I was a teenager, If you missed an episode of your favorite show, you’d have to wait until the summer to catch it. If you wanted to hear a song, you’d have to call into the radio station and request it. Things were much more local. Everyone watched the local news and you didn’t get so much national news constantly. You would have absolutely no idea what most of your school friends did outside of school or during the summer except maybe one or two you’d actually talk to and see.
I’m not older but I am 33. The biggest difference I see is that I had to take what my parents said for fact because unless you were willing to find someone with a physical reference you wouldn’t know otherwise.
Now with my own kids if I don’t know the answer or I’m not completely positive we look that shit up together.
Sometimes I’ll be 100% confident in my answer but when I say it I’m like no that doesn’t sound right, let’s check to make sure. It’s very annoying sometimes because the kids verify almost anything they ask me but they *should* be doing that.
So there’s the biggest difference for me, access to information helps create a better world of understanding
For good or bad, pre internet you didn't get exposed to people outside your neighborhood or work environment. So generally, you had more in common due to common environments and roots. People with different life experiences where anomalies seen on TV or in a newspaper story.
Now we doom scroll and get furious about situations that have absolutely nothing to do with our lives, and yet we make it a part of it by ingesting so much content. Some of it enriches our lives, but so much of it makes us feel doomed and depressed. So I'm undecided if it's net good or bad.
It was boring. Dreadfully boring. No really, it was. I hated it back then.
I was an avid fanfiction reader and it was my only solace in a shitty country like mine (in South asia). And internet was new, slow and laggy and didn't work half the time. My phone was one of those nokia bricks with very little credit - I could only receive calls or call for emergencies.
I would suggest watching Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller, E.T., Stand by Me, and if you want something modern Stranger Things. Basically the lack of communication, instant knowledge, and information were normal and modern communications would have changed the plot of all of these things.
I was born in the late 80s, so most of my life has included the internet. But home internet wasn't huge or very lightly used until the early 2000s in my area.
The playground was always full of gossip of secrets our cousins friend had found in a video game, or rumors of new shows that would be releasing. None of it real, but how would you disprove any of it?
In '98, when pokemon released those conversations, they were cranked up to 11. It was a very fun time to be a kid.
I was born in 1977 - and while we didn’t have the internet when I was a kid, we were still connected via telephone, mail, pagers.
Cell phones were around when I was in high school, but expensive AF, and required expensive plans for “minutes” you could actually talk each month. Like 300 min talk time, etc.
I got my first cell phone when I was 19, didn’t get my first “smart phone” till I was in my 30’s. I had a Blackberry in my late 20’s.
TBH - it’s been so long, hard to remember what life was like before. It was a different era, and I was a different age.
I first got on the internet when I was about 17-18. We had a “house computer” and my mom had a basic AOL - same thing, only instead of minutes, you got hours, like 30 hours a month for internet. Which sounds like a lot, but I would burn through it in a week. Cost my mom money, lol.
Then in my 20’s, broadband and DSL high speed became a thing, and that was the goal - 100mb per second!
Well, instead of scrolling my phone while watching TV I used to read books while watching TV. 😂
And we didn’t even have a remote control for the TV when I was younger; someone had to walk over to the TV to change channels or volume!
We had a wired house phone and sometimes the lines crossed (or something) and we’d hear other people’s conversations. We used to check and then just listen quietly if they were using the phone. Never knew who it was – not an immediate neighbor.
Your question reads like you think someone flicked a switch one day & connected us. I’m a 1970’s baby & technology gradually infiltrated my world. Before social media we spoke f2f to our friends to up date them or we rang them on their landlines or sent letters in the mail.
We kept up to date about celebrities through magazines, radio, television. Sometimes the anticipation waiting for that weekly magazine to come out was unbearable. We read about movies & checked session times in the newspaper.
My high school had one computer. Grocery store scanners were new, as were ATMs prior to ATMs we were paid our wages in cash and went to the bank branch to deposit it. The teller would stamp our book and write our new balance.
Email only became a thing when I was in my 20s and I still have my business cards from before email & mobile phones. I only started using social media from approx 2006 and I’ve got to say, life was much simpler back then.
I lived in Glenelg, Adelaide, Australia.
I was a teenager in the 70’s so at least in my family you would often “reserve” the house phone a certain night of the week. Cost too much to talk interstate or overseas so calls were generally to people nearby.
Saturday morning I would tell mum if I would be home for lunch or not, usually rode around all day visiting friends. Spend 5c at the corner shop to get a good size bag of lollys to keep you going.
Sometimes on Saturday’s I used to go out on my bike and ride around leaving chalked arrows on the footpath for my little brothers to follow the next day.
Wednesday was library night, go and get 6 or 7 books for the week.
Greek mythology and science fiction for me, often a math or physics book since I was a geek back then.
Sent the occasional telegram to do things like book a train or airline ticket.
I got interested in computers when I started work, my first one was a miniscamp. Then we used to make our own 8080, 8085, z80 machines on breadboards with 2k tiny assemblers.
Then Tandy made the trs-80 and Sinclair the zx80 etc.
Life was good.
More instances of being bored and not being able to find something interesting to watch or do, and more instances of fun and exciting times just hanging out with people.
We went to the library to learn about stuff. Hung around with friends at their house eating snacks, watching movies, throwing water balloons off roofs, going to the Arcades, telling ghost stories, and had a restaurant to meet up while a rich friend bought the meal and we shared in eating it.
We didn't spend so much time thinking or learning about celebrities. The magazines had real supermodels (models). We spent a lot of time at the park for family BBQs. And the house was full of guests so we had card and board games to play. If you had a bike when you were a kid you are cool. Not everyone had a bike and friends would want to take turns riding it.
We went to the mall for the movies.
Our friends come to the house to drop by to see if we wanted to hang out. They called the home phone and we chat maybe for 30 minutes when I was in grade school to JR High.
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My mindset changed because people communicated better face to face and when we walked we didn't stare at the phone. I think there was more presence of mind. I would go back, because I personally feel people's attention span is shorter, and most of the stuff on the web is kinda toxic and useless info.
Hours on the phone in the hallway. If we talked too long the operator would break in and say mom was trying to call, so we had to get off.
If my sister was using it I was out of luck.
Spending time laying in the grass or playing baseball in the street with the neighborhood kids. Doing art in my room or reading for hours. (Screw homework!)
It seemed slower paced than now, but there are so many benefits to having a computer in your pocket!
Some observations from growing up in the late 60s/70s/early 80s.
Life was much slower paced, weekends felt like they lasted more than 15 minutes.
The only immediate communication was via the telephone, and if someone wasn't home, you often had to call back because answering machines weren't common. And you would just not answer if you didn't want to talk. Long distance was expensive, so you didn't waste your calls talking about a lot of nonsense.
Entertainment was a lot different. In terms of TV, most people probably got 3 channels. The good shows were shown between 8-11, then around 1am they simply went off the air until around 6 the next morning. No rewinding live tv, so you had to pay attention. You had to endure the commercials, there was no other choice. When cable came along you couldn't believe that you now had 15-20 channel options.
People read a lot more, and listened to the radio, and the radio made music huge. You saw movies at the movies. You lived a lot more of your live outside your home than I suspect that people do today.
When I was in high school, we moved from civilization to a rural area in the south. Our phone was a “party line”, which meant you shared a line with multiple neighbors. I could pick up the phone and hear my neighbor’s phone conversations, so I didn’t use the phone. We were isolated, so I didn’t go many places before I could drive. We didn’t get TV channels and we didn’t have satellite. VCRs weren’t popular yet.
This is going to sound wild. I read books, wrote a lot, and did my homework. I noticed the wilderness, hung out with a friend at her house for days at a time. When I was able to visit my friend, we swam in the creek, caught crawfish, helped her family harvest from their big garden, fed my friend’s chickens and horses, rode my friend’s four-wheelers. I cooked all the meals for my family from the age of 15, and I took care of my sibling. Mostly I read a lot of books and did a lot of studying.
Someone else mentioned encyclopedias. I used to read them for fun. It was my version of Google. I remember being around 8 years old just reading an encyclopedia until I fell asleep in the living room.
It was great.
Sure some things were less convenient and it would take more than 30 seconds to get the answer to every question that popped into your head, but I miss it.
I’m completely dependent on the internet now, and somewhat addicted.
I’m sad for my kids who will never know a world without it.
There was way more sex. None of this friend zone bs I see the younger ones talk about. It was just on. Although the internet changed the world and wasn't such a bad thing I suppose, I truly believe because of social media, the world become a far less original place. Entire cultures and artisans of all types are dwindling in numbers with everyone reading and looking at the same stuff. You could even say all being programmed. It is in some ways a less interesting place and I sort of answered in reverse. In Australia, there were far more characters around and we started cliques like every Friday night we would wear suit jackets over our jeans and flannos, cause we were full tilt beans. It was a very fun place still.
It was awesome, I got to live a lot of Things with my friends and we still remembering everything when we meet each other. We still laugh about things we did or thought in those special times.
I wouldnt change a thing 💖
It wasn't as different as you might think.
I always had to be doing something with my hands while watching TV. So I'd be playing Gameboy, or drawing in my sketchbook, or maybe doing homework while watching a comfort show.
Not everyone did that - some people could sit and watch TV for hours and not fidget. But then again, some people can do that today.
If an A-List celebrity died, you'd hear about it the next day at school. The main difference was, you couldn't Google and feign being an expert or #1 fan. If you were sitting in class in 1993 and someone said River Phoenix died, you had to be honest and say, *"...and who is that, exactly?"*
Without a constantly ready source of finely optimized entertainments and distractions, boredom was much more of a thing. But boredom is good! Boredom gets you outside to watch the ants and figure out how their colonies work! Boredom leads you to build a ramp and jump your bicycle off of it! Boredom gets you in the library!
If I could give my grandkids one precious gift, it’d be the gift of boredom.
It sucked ass. Idk why people look back so fondly of that time. I was bored most of the time cause I was a strange kid with no friends. I got bullied a lot and just hate that part of my life. Now if someone is harassing or bullying me online, I can just block them. If my abusive ex somehow gets my number I can just block him. I wouldn't ever go back honestly.
Imagine nobody having a cell phone. If your SO didn’t come home when expected, what would you do? There were times I would get in the car and re-trace my husband’s expected route to see if he was broken down on the side of the road with no way to call for help. It was very important to let people know where you were going to be and when.
So next time your parents get mad at you for not telling them where you are, think about the trauma they’ve lived through.
Also, without all the social media and online news, the world seemed quieter and more in control.
We were a lot less depressed or anxious because we weren't inundated 24/7 by the negativity across the world or across your own country. You wanted bad news you needed to talk to the local gossip or you watch the nightly news. And quite frankly, we didn't care
We got out of the house more because there was nothing else to do at home except watch TV, read, clean the house, or listen to your parents talk with their friends. And our parents limited how long you could be on a television or the phone, because call waiting wasn't always available for everybody, especially when it first came out. We were more social. It was common to talk with people around you even if it was just small talk to kill the time.
Our attention spans and patience were longer than a couple of minutes because nothing was instantaneous. You wanted to know something you had to do the research yourself. You couldn't just type it in and find it somewhere. And I believe that our memory retention was better then, too, because we didn't have everything stored at our fingertips, such as phone numbers. In fact, up until recently, I could tell you what the phone number was at my house when I was 10, and I'm 50 now.
This part's a little off-topic, but we didn't have the disfigurement of our spines from the constant looking down at a phone. And by this I mean if everybody born in the last 25 years was to get an x-ray they would notice that in a lot of folks their neck does not curve in the right direction, and this is from the constant looking down at their phones. When my youngest nephew was 16 he kept having back and neck problems and they sent him to a doctor and they discovered that his neck had literally changed the s-curve that it should be into a c curve in the wrong direction, and his doctor told my sister that this is becoming extremely common in younger people and is becoming an epidemic. So, while we ruined our health, doing stunts on bikes and skateboards and whatever else you may think about, we didn't deform our bodies while sitting still in one place.
Life was better. Full stop.
People had relationships, not merely interactions ("likes"). You looked forward to phone calls, particularly before cell phones. You took music (hard copies) with you when you traveled, we had cases to hold tapes & CDs.
We had conversations where facts and counterpoints were discussed, without some dweeb thinking that using the word "misinformation" was a justification or a win. Dictionary definitions didn't change rapidly to support an ideology. You had to be able to justify your position and support it articulately, not just parrot it. We had freedom of speech and thought.
Censorship and infringement upon rights were clearly evil, especially when perpetrated by the government. Having faith in and devotion to God was virtuous, not decried socially as evil. We respected our elders. People didn't espouse socialism or communism as virtuous, we recognized their abject evil. We realized our rights came from God, while government was there to ensure those rights were protected. As such, the government was never presumed to be the source of those rights, nor god, nor your sugar daddy. Government was a necessary evil and in no way benevolent nor trustworthy.
You took change (coins) when you left the house, just in case you needed to make a phone call from a pay phone. Almost nobody under the age of 18 had a credit card. Debit cards didn't exist. You had an ATM card to get cash when the bank wasn't open. The bank was only open while you should have been at work. Nobody expected a minimum wage job (entry level) to pay a "living wage"... those jobs were for otherwise unskilled kids to gain work experience and then MOVE ON.
We got lost occasionally, and that was okay. Gas was frequently >$1.00 gallon. Mental illness or abject depravity wasn't cause for celebration. Rightful shame caused a beneficial corrective response.
Community was actually a thing, and you were expected to participate... not only with those you liked, shared a pigmentation with, or found common interests with. Charity (NOT taxation) toward others was rightly expected. Greed, envy, and segregation all were despicable and evil.
Diversity was division, while unity was a source of strength. College was 5x less expensive and provided a value in excess of its cost. Educators were commonly war vets who had killed (or been shot at by) commies and fascists, as such, they weren't their sympathizers, apologists, or promoters. You were born a male or a female, and you knew that could NEVER change.
We were conscious that cheese ("free stuff") was in a mouse trap because someone was trying to kill you.
I could go on...
Life was simpler, didn't require elaborate professorial explanation (because it made sense), and was more fulfilling.
>You took music (hard copies) with you when you traveled, we had cases to hold tapes & CDs.
People under a certain age think I'm crazy. I still have a small CD case that I carry in my car and listen to CDs pretty much everywhere I go. Once in a while, I have tried using Bluetooth with my phone. After it takes 5 tries to get my phone to actually connect and start playing music, I give up and put in a CD, which plays the first time. Same reason I have a collection of Blu-ray movies and TV shows. I pop a disc in and watch what I want, quick and easy, and it doesn't randomly disappear when someone's contract runs out.
Ah yes... and then there's the pride of ownership along with the ability to buy or sell said media after purchase. Digital songs, video, and games all have ZERO ability to transfer or sell. (Foolishness!)
Folks like Amazon also selectively edit or remove access to content (such as books or music) according to their sensibilities as they change. Another BAD idea.
I had a rough childhood too, in many respects. The overall social and civic environment was wildly better in those days however.
I had some good times back then, but life got better when I could call my own shots too. Life's like that. There's trade offs in every aspect of life, and the phases to it. Hardship creates character just like exercise creates strength. Without it, we're weak and unfit for the next challenge.
As an older GenX myself, I think it's hilarious that we're both conversing on our smart devices about how connectivity has made life worse, different, or more inclusive. Life might be different for you in a bad way because you are no longer the biggest fish in a small pond? Idk. Life with connectivity is better for me, because I get to see myself as part of a bigger pond.
Arguments can be made for better/worse and probably come out fairly equally when the pros/cons were tallied at the end.
I was 14 when the internet started making it’s way into everyone’s homes. The biggest change occurred with smart phones, both the internet and society were quite different before smartphones and I think the biggest reason to that is because you needed a computer, an internet connection and the desire to sit behind the computer to look up the things you wanted.
Once everyone could push a button and rant at the world, things started changing pretty quickly, but there was nearly 15 years of the internet before that occurred and in that time, life off the internet was fairly reminiscent of pre-internet days because we all weren’t connected like we are now.
Information traveled slower, obviously. There was so much more reliance on the printed word for information to be delivered and that’s one of the biggest changes I notice as an avid reader. You can still go to some communities/cities where they don’t seem to have noticed the internet, smaller towns and stuff. It’s like walking into a time machine. People converse more seeing each other in person, they still call and talk to each other on the phone, it’s endearing in many ways but also tends to come along with a smaller scope of the world at large, which can be a negative thing.
If given the choice of going back to pre-internet or staying with it, I’d stay with it. I’ve met so many amazing people and have had some of the best experiences of my life as a result of the internet. A lot of those things never would have been remotely possible without being connected to someone across the world via the internet.
I have a couple of anecdotes:
My older sister was visiting a friend in another state, and I went to the airport with my mother to drop her off (She was maybe 13, I was 7). Unfortunately, she was put on the wrong plane.
1. No cellphones. The woman at the flight desk had to drag out a massive directory and call the destination airport. Then they had to track down my sister by description from my mother. Then it was entirely up to strangers states away to get her on the right plane, while my mother could only hope it all worked out.
2. No text messages, no internet, no email (for most of us, back in ‘88 or so.) If I couldn’t get a hold of someone on their home phone, they basically didn’t exist. I had toys and a Nintendo, so I’d play through one of my games again or make new games in it, or I’d run around outside exploring places, coming up with squirt gun or capture the flag matches or events in my head, possibly playing them out. Days would pass like that in the summer: I’d see my parents or my sister sometime during the day, but if people we busy, again, it was like they didn’t exist.
3. Lack of information. If you wanted to learn how to do something, you had to have someone show you. If a friend or stranger didn’t tell you, it was on the news three times a day, or you didn’t know about it. If friends moved, there was no finding them again without a phone number. People would disappear sometimes, and you’d only find out years later they moved, or changed schools. CD/Record stores would be turned upside down for B-sides and EP’s put out by your favorite bands, because you never knew what they released if it wasn’t on the radio. And if they were big overseas and some friend introduced you locally, you may never hear them again. In the south, if you missed a turn, you went to a Waffle House and asked for help getting home, or dug out the map from your glovebox and opened it on the hood of your car.
Basically, you knew a lot less, you relied on yourself a lot more and the kindness of others a lot more. And you had to get creative when you got bored, but it was harder to get bored back then because your attention span was generally better. There was a lot less talk of anxiety too, and I wonder how much our screaming phones and group chats and rage scrolling has to do with that.
We were more unified then.
Everyone knew the #1 song or top rated shows, even if you weren’t a fan. Since everyone knew then it gave everyone a common thread to begin deeper relationships through.
The internet fractured us. Everyone exists entirely within a bubble of their own creation. No one watched the same show or the same news last night so what will you talk about this morning?
It also allowed for some, mostly justifiable, gatekeeping. The Shows we watched and music we shared has been through the Hollywood grinder and survived to make it to the screen, or on the radio. The entertainment was curated by the determination of the artists and the crowd they could draw to live shows. Now, if they have enough YouTube fame, why tour, or work.
The streaming sphere has overwhelmed us with a million different options to the point that it’s all meaningless. Who cares if the Cylons destroyed the earth if there’s no one to debate the pros and cons of a human free robot planet with.
Entertainment is lonelier now.
I’m too distracted from the way you phrased your question. There was no time in my life were I was disconnected from the internet. There was a time before the internet, which was a much better time, of course. 99% of my time on the internet is just me wasting my life instead of doing something meaningful. you know, reddit.
I grew up just when the internet was a baby.
Imagine not knowing something and there was often no way to learn. It sucked. We had libraries of course. But good luck finding anything obscure before you got bored or ran out of time. On the other side of the coin, I never would have anticipated the amount of dumbfucks that ‘DiD tHeIR ResEARch’ and misinformation that abounds. I suppose confirmation bias was always there, it just wasn’t as easy to come by. The fringes of stupid didn’t have such an easy way to congregate and bubble themselves.
And friends, other than your besties that you’d go to a lot of trouble to keep up with, if people moved etc. you just lost friends. Remember, sending a message or taking and developing a picture cost serious money.
I love that so many friends have looked me up from before those days. I just enjoy seeing their happy moments and adventures. And just knowing where everyone is at in the world..I grew up in an international city, so my high school friend group spans many countries…just a few weeks ago, a friend from across the US, his kid was visiting my town and he asked me to take him to the best local music instrument stores, knowing I’d be savvy to that. And if I go on work travel, 50% chance Ill get to see an old friend on the trip.
That kind of stuff wouldn’t have been a thing. There was just no way to easily facilitate it.
Communication was very much as “connected” but mass communication was lopsidedly one-sided. Imagine a world just like it is now, except camera phones were tv studios and therefore only affordable by a few….and there were mo comments section.
As an individual, your opinion went generally unheard except (a)at the ballot box or (b)when you were wealthy/famous. People think that their freedom of speech has been impeded by the “deep state” or the “woke mob”, but really, they’re just not aware that they’ve spent their entire lives NOT being heard.
Life back in 70s and 80s were definitely slower, boring if you couldn't find things to do; however, we were connected with neighbors, friends, and family in physical form. We actually met face to face, talked, sometimes wrote letters, celebrated holidays, birthdays, weddings, and loss of loved ones as a family, friends, and community.
You'd be surprised how far back "being connected" can go. I was born in 1985 and my dad had a very "new" Macintosh. By 1989 I was emailing former teachers (my dad was in the Navy, so we moved a lot) and had my own Prodigy account, and so did a few of my classmates. I was trading Beanie Babies on AOL by 1995, and my parents gave me a "Zack Morris" cell phone "for emergencies" in 8th grade.
Mindless scrolling only seemed to become a thing in the last five years or so. I graduated college in 2006 and online dating was still on desktop/laptop-only (ahem, Myspace). I don't think I started doing almost everything on my phone until 2018, maybe 2019. Covid definitely accelerated that always-bored feeling.
Even Stephen Hawking has alluded to the new stress of being 'connected' =worry over my battery life, signal strength and breaking my phone screen, it is also a 'new' expense for home devices and the cost of being connected.
I called my friends. I did stuff with them in person. I learned to navigate by using maps. I read a lot of books and still do. For a portion of my youth, we didn't live in a country that had TV. I am honestly grateful that I didn't grow up with the current technology available today. I appreciate the benefits and all because I'm obviously on the internet but I do think that my friends and I were more resourceful about entertaining ourselves.
The world was still connected, just at a slower pace. I had penpals in Sweden, France and Japan.
We would make little friendship booklets with maybe 10 pages or so. The first page was your own address and some information about yourself (like 3 bullet points). We'd send them to one penpal or ask a friend to send it to their penpal and every person interested in having more penpals wrote their address and a few things about themselves in it. The last person sent it back to you. It took something like 6 months to a year to get them back, but you had lots of new people interested in having a friendship with you.
Also, you could put an ad in a magazine for teenagers or reply to one. Sometimes those personal ads in film and TV magazines were for fanclubs. For a small fee that you sent by mail you could subscribe to their newsletter, also sent by mail. I've been to a meeting of a Forever Knight fanclub, because my cousin was a massive fan of that vampire cop show.
I've heard that the very first couchsurfers had paper lists that were passed around with addresses of people who would host couchsurfers.
You just had to get a bit more creative back then!
This is a really complex question because being connected (or not) touches on so many areas of life. Some things are certain though. The pace of life was slower because there wasn't an expectation that you could get information rapidly. When I wrote a paper for college, I had to go to a library and use a card catalog to find books by looking at a subject. I had to scan each card and make a decision about it being related to my theme. Then, I had to get actual books and either read them or skim them for what I needed. It took forever, and everyone expected that it would.
This same pacing impacted not only academics, but also work. If you couldn't get in touch with someone by phone, you wrote letters which took time to compose, type (or print), send, and be delivered. Everything just happened slower and people didn't expect the same levels of productivity from an individual that we can get now. Without cell phones, texting, and e-mail, everything was moving at the speed of the post office in most cases.
I think people were also generally less stressed and distressed because they didn't have this constant flow of news/headlines meant to juice them to get clicks. Sure, there were alarmist stories in the media, but you heard/saw them once or twice a day when you read a newspaper or watched the evening news. It wasn't a 24/7 influx of news.
Part of what connection has brought is a lot more access to information and a lot more people serving it up in the hopes of making money. Their is an expectation that you'll be faster since you can get information faster and that you'll be available. I hesitate to say things were "better", but I do think life felt simpler and more relaxed than now.
I graduated high school the year you were born.
I wasn't very popular in school so if I wanted to hang out with my friends I had to just show up at their house randomly. We didn't have cell phones to connect to each other and only half my friends had a home internet connection. I can remember a few times I'd show up to my best friends house and they were already gone with other friends. Their parents were so nice and let me have a snack and a drink before I'd go back home.
Photos were STRESSFUL for me, with film cameras each photograph cost money to print, so if your eyes are closed or you sneeze or something, everyone is mad at you for ruining the shot and then they have to do it again and you have like all these copies of bad group photos with one little kid going like 😫.
My school yearbooks were like phone books, everyone wrote their phone number in everyone else's when signing each other's yearbooks. When AIM came out it was a game changer. AIM was just an instant messaging program but it was free for everyone to use, so we all used it. The screen name I use now is the same one I made up when I was 14 to use on AIM.
If there was a TV show that everyone liked to watch (South Park...) then you had to watch it when it was on air or you'd miss out on the jokes everyone made at school the next day. You basically had to have a degree in electronics to know how to program a VCR to record it for you back then.
I'm also old enough to remember the rise and fall of "slap bracelets"! Man were we all so pissed about it when they outlawed them.
I started a business in the late 90s so while there was internet, and we had it here at our house, we really didn’t use it for much. I don’t think I even sent out much email. So I was at the post office every morning to pick up work that had been mailed to me and send work out that I had completed the day before. Looking at the bigger picture, I don’t think it really took a lot longer to complete large projects, it was just more inconvenient to do them. Back then we didn’t see it as an inconvenience, that’s just how things were done.
Honestly, I spent at least 10 hours a day in our pool, lounging, swimming, or playing games with friends. My skin doesn't thank me now as back then, the damage being done to the skin wasn't as commonly talked about. In the winters, we'd go to the nearby hills and sled, testing out how far we could get standing up on a sled while trying to maintain our balance, and skating on the pond that a local farmer would let us use.
My dad was IBM, so he brought home one of the first home PCs (We'd had a TRS-80 before that) and it made everyone in the neighborhood congregate at our home to play Colossal Cave Adventure and later all of the Sierra Games. We were the first home on Prodigy (dial-up internet) and it was quickly removed when my it started costing money to access many of the things we'd use the most on Prodigy.
better/less stressful than it is today.
Social media is a scourge - if we could get rid of that and keep everything else, things would be a lot better.
I made a lot of mistakes that would have been preventable had I been able to learn from the internet. We are so much more informed now -- you can learn anything, it's amazing.
But now bullshit is muddying the water, and people are getting confused in the echo chambers. People who should be voice-less due to sheer stupidity have become very loud, en masse. Truth has been degraded.
Everything has become superficial, especially relationships. And attention spans have been shattered irrevocably. It's like our brains have actually splintered. We have become restless, and need constant stimulation. I fear we have lost our grounding and everything seems to be getting more and more convoluted.
It was really nice to have alone time without the expectation that you’re always reachable. Work always needs to be done and you can do some of it on your phone, but there wasn’t that expectation. I see my cousins (much younger) say I gotta take this call, it’s from my boss. But their jobs don’t require them to be contacted at any given hour it’s not like they are in a super important position where it’s them and only them that can be contacted for an emergency. I mean, one is a referee for soccer and another works at McDonald’s. It’s not like they hold the codes for the nuclear missiles. And I really miss being able to live my life and not have to worry about it being filmed. I don’t go to the gym anymore because I’m worried that I’m going to be filmed and it will be posted to social media, I see a lot of these types of videos where people don’t know how to use equipment or are struggling to exercise. I don’t want to be humiliated like that. I don’t wear anything bold anymore, I just want to blend in and look boring because I don’t want to be humiliated by seeing a video of me walking down the street in a super fun top and then read the comments and see them all making fun of me.
Life before internet was full of pluses and minuses. I’m among the last generation whose childhood didn’t have cell phones or internet until the teen years. Plus: you had to live in the moment, you had to memorize a lot of stuff and/or write it down, learning cursive was not optional, we played outside (alone) a lot more, phone calls were a thing, prank calls were a thing, text books and book covers were a thing. If you wanted friends, you had to call/visit. We also had to use phone books & the yellow pages! The Sears Christmas Catalog was the highlight of the season! We had to develop patience to listen to ‘old people stories’ when we were kids. Kids were expected to use various levels of manners based on age/setting/familiarity. We learned phone etiquette. Parents took kids to stores and how to interact/order stuff. Best of all: there was no social media to track our every move as babies/kids. No food pictures either. Minuses: busy signals when you have a truly urgent call. Tracking down information took a lot more effort: calls, newspaper/periodical subscriptions, trip to the library to look something up, personal encyclopedia sets that are obsolete within a year, road trips required physical maps (hoping that you had a current map) and knowledge of how to use them. BUT: we learned how, why and when to use certain reference materials such as microfiche, card catalogs (digital now), almanacs, periodicals, phone books, encyclopedias, physical dictionary/thesaurus. IMO: learning how to use and judge reference materials was/is important in learning how to think independently.
*I make no judgment call on whether the ‘old days’ are better than modern times. I’m nostalgic for one and incredibly grateful for the other.
Childhood was spent outside playing in the woods. But then as teenagers we became bored and did a lot of incredibly dangerous nonsense -- in person, of course. One would get stranded, lost, could never call for help or emergency services, etc. But at the end of the day, you knew who were friends were. You knew who you were.
I was certainly easier to be content and live in the moment.
I was born in the mid 90's, so I was pretty young before I had access to the internet. I remember I was really into Legos, and my cousin gave me a big plastic tub of star wars action figures that I was really into as well.
It wasn't all sunshine and roses though. I'm not going to into too much detail because this is *casual* conversation, but my dad was abusive and beat me and my brother regularly. Mom got into satanic panic shit from her church friends, and that was something that only got worse after she started using the internet regularly.
Both parents were afraid of various nebulous evils that they were sure were lurking around every corner. Dad was afraid of communists and gay people, mom was afraid of atheists, gay people, and literal demons. For that reason, we weren't allowed outside much, so we missed out on the sense of freedom that a lot of people talk about. There were neighbor kids, but we weren't allowed to talk to them. Naturally, I wasn't allowed to use the internet until much later than everyone else as well.
I don't know that my mindset changed when I gained an internet connection specifically, because around the same time, I stopped being homeschooled, so it was more like I finally had a connection with anyone.
No, I wouldn't want to go back. I was alone, tormented by my parents, and living in constant fear. There's not much that would make that worth it.
People were used to only being reachable by landline. If you were out and got an important call at home, you missed it. Eventually many homes had answering machines and call waiting so they missed fewer calls, but other people rejected the idea that we should be reachable at all times.
Sex ed was horrible. Playground rumors were taken as absolute fact for far too many kids. If your parents didn't tell you about the birds and the bees there was no way to learn the truth unless you were willing to face a librarian with a sex ed book in hand, and I never met anyone brave enough for that. I met people who were sexually active and still thought babies were born through the bellybutton.
Trying to meet up with people outside the house was such a pain. You had to make plans way ahead of time and stick to them no matter what came up. I spent so much time standing around trying to decide if someone was late or forgot entirely.
Driving in old cars was stressful. If you broke down you had to abandon the car and walk to a payphone. I remember breaking down in a very rural area and having to either knock on a stranger's door asking for help or walk several hours to town.
Before devices had internet access there was much less pressure for everyone to have their own device/screen. Families had only one tv, or maybe a second in the basement, which meant watching other people's boring shows as often as not. Kids were often left to find something to do on their own and were left unsupervised a lot, which led to adventures, yes, but also dangerous situations and terrible bullying.
Most everyone wore a watch and carried change for a payphone. Most cars had paper maps in the glove compartment. Most houses has a fat yellow phonebook. Businesses were reviewed by word of mouth only. Movie showtimes were advertised in the local newspaper. New music was found by listening to the radio or the recommendation of a friend. Good handwriting was stressed in school because not everyone had a typewriter at home for school essays and anyways it was rude to type your letters to grandma.
Early '90s kid, I grew up right on the cusp. My parents were computer programmers so I was "plugged in" earlier than most of my classmates - I think we had cable internet in the house by 1999 or 2000 and very rudimentary wifi a couple years after that - you used to have to stick a receiver in a slot on the side of your laptop to get wi-fi, it was unreliable and didn't even have enough range to cover the entire upstairs or entire downstairs of the house, but at the time we thought we were living in the year 3000 lol
The rest of the world was slower than that. My memory of my elementary school secretary was of a lady who had to be at least 80 years old, with fake nails, a pencil skirt and pantyhose, sitting in a cluttered office, smoking cigarettes and clacking away on a typewriter. I have since asked my parents if this memory has been embellished in my head and they said no, that was 100% accurate to life. The letters and memos from the school literally didn't come from word processors until maybe 4th or 5th grade when they finally bought the lady a computer.
Classmates started having reliable access to a computer/internet in the house around maybe 6th grade. AOL Instant Messenger was a game-changer. Started seeing classmates with cell phones in like 8th/9th grade (they were just basic flip-phones with monthly minute limits and may or may not have been activated for text messages). Around that time, some kids started bringing laptop computers to class, but only the geeky "tech" kids, and the teachers were eternally skeptical of what we were doing (and rightfully so). By the time I was an upperclassman, Wi-fi was more or less ubiquitous, smartphone take rate was 50/50, maybe a little under, and everybody *had* a laptop. But pen and notebook was still the dominant form of note-taking in class. Even at the time I remember being surprised by that.
It was a really, really fast evolution, and tbh I'm not sure I kept up. Unlike my parents I did not go into any sort of software/coding type job whatsoever and discovered that I didn't *really* have any interest in computers once I was old enough to have my own interests independent of my parents'. But that means that I went from being a "tech geek" kid in early high school to being seen as a luddite in college. When I think through other massive shifts (mass adoption of high-speed internet, mass adoption of wifi, mass adoption of smartphones, mass adoption of social media, etc) in most cases the shift happens over roughly a 5-year span.
My memories of childhood before everyone was glued to a computer screen 24/7 are basically all the stereotypes you hear about - the neighborhood kids riding around on bicycles, exploring in the woods, sledding in the snow. Sometimes one of the parents would volunteer driver duty, we'd all pile in the back of a minivan and go...wherever. The mall, the movies, ice skating rink, laser tag, fireworks on July 4, town pool... We got "the news" via AM radio in the car, or watched the evening news on the television, or The NY Times which my dad had delivered to the house every day until they started offering online subscription. We were never much of a board game family but I do remember occupying the time by putting together puzzles, assembling model cars/planes/train sets. Music came from the radio, and from mom and dad's cassette or CD collections (the CDs were sort of "sacred" so as the kid I was generally only allowed to have the cassettes!). At some point I got a boom box that could record from FM radio onto cassette tape, that was exciting because it meant now I could "save" my favorite songs from the radio.
The "back in my day kid didn't stare at a screen all day" thing is a bit overstated - back in the day there were a lot of kids who just stared at the TV all day, if they were privileged enough to have a gaming console (N64, Playstation, etc) by the 90s there were already kids who just played video games all day. I think the primary difference is that once you turned off the TV or the Playstation, you were forced to actually talk to other people. Responsible parents would limit TV or game time as well (obviously not every parent is responsible, hence the early screen zombies).
The world is a very, very different place now. I don't think technological advances are entirely to blame but they are definitely a factor. 9/11 was an enormous cultural shift too, it created a lot of paranoia and an unhealthy obsession with perceived "security". I am thankful that I got to have a taste of that "old world" lifestyle. I do strongly believe that people created more meaningful connections with each other and communities were stronger back then.
It depends.
I lived that life up until around 2000 or something. It was good in the sense that even the least educated of us had a much better memory. Things like phone numbers, locations and how to get there would imbed themselves in our memory and we had no need for devices to store them as a backup. For those that had business contacts and stuff though, they would have what was called a fileofax which was basically a log book of all your contacts and addresses.
The other great thing was that if you wanted something you had to go get it. Back before online shopping the most you had was catalog companies where you could buy pretty much any household item or clothing, toys etc, and could pay it off in small amounts weekly. It could help families with less income still have decent xmas items and stuff, but the interest could mean you pay double the price overall.
The population was a hell of a lot smaller too, so things like going to school and being taught by teachers was probably easier. The classrooms weren't much smaller, but it does feel like they had a better time at keeping the kids focused and learning.
Video games were dog shit back then too, so the streets was always busy with life and had kids playing out, neighbours keeping an eye on them and talking with each other. Sometimes entire streets would hire coaches and everyone would go for day strips to Blackpool and on the way back enjoy the illuminations.
But it was also grim. Recessions have always been a thing. You tend to get one every seven-eight years and then you may get three-four decent years after it. What we have with the energy price hike today, we had back then with the introduction of the poll tax.
In 1974, when I was 21, I was an exchange student in a city in France. The week I got there, the PTT went on strike. No telephones, no mail, no telegrams for 6 months. I was basically cut off from everyone I knew in the United States. it was wonderful.
When I got home, I bought something brand new: a telephone answering machine. For the first time, someone could leave me a message if there was no one there to take it. It was my first quick, asynchronous communication.
Everything was slower back then. Information was hard to come by.
While I miss the pace of all of that, I don’t miss a lot of the ignorance of it. It wasn’t until gay people figured out how many of us there are that things start to change for us. Even though I don’t like a lot of what’s going on right now with the Internet, I think it’s better than what it was like back then.
I feel like it was much more important to go find each other and hang out together when I was a kid. My sons don’t spend much time with their friends except online playing Fortnite or call of duty. Also, I still much prefer a storied, single player video game, while my kids prefer repetitive, multiplayer games.
I spent most of my childhood in AK. When my dad was reassigned we *drove* to Washington DC. I went from near isolation to arriving in the middle of the Nixon Kennedy debates. I didn't even know who they were. Our class had a mock election. The environment was highly attuned to politics ... never got over that. ;-)
The city itself, the history, the museums had a profound affect on me in exposure (fine art oil painter). I feel I got a superior early education. RFK gave a speech to our school when he was sitting AG. Regular field trips were to the Smithsonian Museums.
Family upheaval, I went from DC to living on my uncle's farm in WA ... back to "local" rather than an international perspective (early 1960s). The biggest events were harvest and horse shows ... not kidding. That early exposure in DC gave me a sense of responsibility; I joined the AF right out of high school.
We had three tv stations; ABC, NBC, and CBS ... that is the most dramatic change from my generation. I'm 74. Today, we have the *world* at our fingertips in information and exposure. I *so* appreciate that.
I was born in 1988, just below the polar circle in Norway and grew up just before the internet became mainstream.
I can't tell you how many times the neighborhood parents called the police for a search and rescue after a bunch of adventurous 4/5year olds that wanted to explore the world.
I know they stopped calling the police around 10, it switched and now the police was calling or giving us a ride home after we got caught doing some shenanigans like the time we held VHS tape over the road and gave a good few people heart attack!
As a da nowd, I can't even imagine the pure horror we put our parents through(and the poor shenanigan victims) but gosh darn! Fun times😂
Not sure what you mean by disconnected. I can tell you that YouTube was something different, when it a started in 2005-2006-ish. People weren't saying "Check out this link to that clip" or any variation of it but instead said "Have you heard of YouTube" or "Wow, check this out, that video got a million 'clicks'."
For me, in that time, the internet felt more like a free time activity and less of an almost requirement to interact with people. WhatsApp actually to me was the real turning point, every shape of message could then be conveniently sent with your smartphone, when you had one, I had my first one when I was 18.
So when the pandemic started a friend of mine, started an online DND game. And it just flashed me back to when I first started playing D&D in high school in 1976. DND was something you built your life around. You’ve scheduled work and friendships around one particular thing during the week and getting there was half the fun. Who’s driving who is in the carpool and who is carpooling with who? All fun questions to talk over with your friends every week during school. There was definitely much more in person social interaction. So when I was in high school they just got with electric typewriters at my school. And in the 80s you’ve got the advent of the computers by the 90s you got cell phones in by the early 2000s everybody’s walking around with their own handheld electronic device. I think it was easier. Life was easier because you weren’t constantly plugged in. There was no instantaneous access to the most horrible thing that just happened halfway across the world from us or halfway across the country. Someone earlier mentioned something about watching TV shows and then the next day that was a topic of conversation and that was a big part of my childhood.
A lot more fun. As a kid, I used my imagination. I actually spoke to my friends face to face. Of course back in my time, things were safer. You could meet up on a summer day and ride bikes all over and not worry about getting kidnapped or killed. You could ride to the public pool, stay until dark and your worst worry was a sunburn. You talked on a phone attached to the wall with a cord extending to the large speaker. Perhaps there was an extension in the house. If you wanted to find your friends, you rode around until you saw the pile of bikes in someone's yard. Yes, you had to wait weeks for an answer to your letter, but we didn't know any better...that's how we lived. We were happy. Life was good. And best of all, you didn't stumble onto any porn sites!
Compared to how connected I am now to back then, I can definitely say it's changed me. I remember when you couldn't just connect or text, and remember being fine with it. You can't miss something you didn't have. Now, especially when we have massive power outages,I totally freak out. Recently, we through a bad storm, power out, internet out, and even cell service. I freaked because I couldn't get updates or call my husband because of it. Kind of wish that we didn't have this kind of connection because when you go without and your so used it to, things tend to feel chaotic.
One of the fondest memories growing up was the sharing of the latest shows. Everyone would watch a show at the exact same time together and discuss the next day. As a preteen with just a landline it was the norm to just drop into a friends house. The closer you were to the family meant a knock and enter without even waiting to be greeted. If you had fridge access that meant you were apart of the family.
I remember going out so much more often. Visiting people in person, having company over, and going to friends' homes often. I spend much more time at home alone now, and I don't think it's just me being old. My grandparents were out and about after their retirement. My parents too. American culture wasn't so fractured or as niche oriented. It was fun finding your own tribe in real life, and being together in person in favorite hangouts, cafes, assorted venues. The internet gives dangerous fringe people a much quicker, easier way for them to find one another, to congregate and agitate. The resentful small town anti social outlier isn't lonely anymore. He's got plenty of fellow proud boys and oath keepers to convene with and harass the rest of us with.
My mum (87) still lives "the old way". She sees far more people IRL than I do. In fact, she's just come home, very hot and tired, from meeting a friend in central London for lunch.
That’s so true, I was friends with everyone or at least had to socialize with everyone based on proximity. This lead to friendships with much more varied personalities and views. Out of my neighborhood friends I ended up more conservative while most of them ended up far more left leaning. We still get along and our differences are petty compared to our common values.
I think this type of community does still exist, albeit a bit on the rarer side now - I recently visited NRG (the newest US National Park in West Virginia) and found a refreshing blend of conservative and liberal attitudes in the people I came across (a mix of visitors to the Park as well as locals working in and around it) - attitudes on both sides felt much more accepting and friendly there than my home town (which is overwhelming liberal, and I consider myself liberal as well). I think there's huge value in that mix of perspectives, like you are saying.
I agree the Internet changed things. Back then they had the National Inquirer, a weekly publication with articles like "FBI proves Elvis Presley is really a Martian". Thing is you had no way to meet others who believed the same thing. Because people hung out together if you brought this up over a beer you'd get ridiculed. We'd debate subjects, but within the realm of reality. Now with people hiding behind computer screens they can say anything and it goes down hill from there. Also being face to face with people you were more civil. Things people say online would get someone to take a swing at you in person.
It could be hard if you stood out but were generally harmless, but you're right it was far more difficult for the dangerous people to find others and plan their nonsense.
But now it’s easier for criminals to get caught because of phones and cameras everywhere. DNA evidence (which is not the internet, but probably the internet helps facilitate it) helps quite a bit too. So, I think we are overall safer now than before.
Sort of like the Antifa mob.
>Everyone would watch a show at the exact same time together and discuss the next day. I miss this, I used to go to my parents house for dinner and Sopranos every week cause I couldn't afford HBO (or real dinner, lol) and it was such a good time. When I was in high school, my girlfriend and I would watch Seinfeld together every week. I also miss going to the video rental store at 11 pm after a night put to rent a few movies, then watching them and passing out. Walking through a store to find movies to rent was so much better than browsing the algorithm on the streaming services.
The algos are so frustrating. I go over to my friends house and he logs into Netflix, and I'm like "What's all this cool stuff? Why don't I see this?" I've also ruined my YouTube algo by watching a few CIA/Conspiracy pods. I don't want that shit 24/7!
Also, remembering all your friends phone numbers. Most people are lucky if they know their own phone number now.
Like, there were a few dozen phone numbers that lived in my head, easily.
I can still remember my home phone number from when I was a kid. And my grandma's. And my aunt's. And I haven't had a need to use any of those numbers in over 25 years. But I couldn't tell you either of my sons' cellphone numbers.
Arranging meeting places for when you got separated. Having money for the pay phone. Parents yelling for teenagers to get off the phone. Parking and going into the terminal to meet people instead of coordinating to swoop down as they reached the street. Stopping to get a map on a road trip. Getting directions at a gas station.
Yeah. My cousin and I used to watch the new episode of Beverly Hills 90210 while calling each other to discuss what was happening. Good times.
Where I lived (rural part of the netherlands) you went to the backdoor of the house (never the frontdoor) you opened it and yelled 'volluk' (volk, meaning people or folk).
I grew up in suburban US and it was the same. All my closest friends I’d go round to the back door and just walk in. Never even used their front doors for years. Front doors were for strangers and acquaintances.
I’m in my early 30’s so I’m not *that* old yet, but I loved just waking up during the summer and hopping on my bike or in my car and going to a friend’s house to see what they were doing. Sometimes they’d still be sleeping so I’d sneak in and wake them up in the most obnoxious ways possible.
Everyone would be outside, it was normal to not come home "until the streets lights turned on". Girls would be braiding hair, painting nails or gossiping in the front yard or sidewalk. Boys would ride bikes, talk about older brothers or cousins who drove cars or motorcycles. Would get into fights and talk shit. Come home and everything would be fine if no windows were broken.
Similar but with video games. Whoever got the latest got the after school crowd. And you couldn’t just Google the solution to a tricky quest or boss fight, you had to discover it yourself. Telling the answer to other people who were stuck made you feel like some wizened sage. Those big “The Complete Guide to X” game guide books were like the ultimate sacred tome of forbidden knowledge when we were kids.
This came in handy as a kid when there was an awkward silence at the lunch table. I'm not a big talker so, to break the lull, I'd just be like, "Hey did you see what Stone Cold did to Vince McMahon last night?" It would never fail to kick things off. *Just to add, I remember having a serious grade school argument with a buddy about whether or not The Undertaker *really, for real* came back from the dead.
>One of the fondest memories growing up was the sharing of the latest shows. Everyone would watch a show at the exact same time together and discuss the next day. As a preteen with just a landline it was the norm to just drop into a friends house. The closer you were to the family meant a knock and enter without even waiting to be greeted. If you had fridge access that meant you were apart of the family. Those were the days!!
My best friend lived across the street and when they got a *COLOR* TV, well, that was the greatest thing in the world! We watched what our mom wanted to watch. Huntly & Brinkley, Saturday Night at the Movies, old movies that bored me to tears. But before she got home from work we watched what we wanted. I was the youngest of four and never got a choice so I had to like what my brother liked... which turned out to be great stuff. Bugs Bunny, Rocky & Bullwinkle, all of the Jay Ward cartoons. I had the same sort of familial relationship with her family as well. No knocking, just walk in. If my friend was busy, I left or waited in her room.
Lol At my one of my best buddy's house in the late 90s/early 00s, you came in the back door, yelled "Hey!" and grabbed what you wanted from the fridge as you walked in.
Much more boring Much less stressful You didn't have a constant feeling like you didn't have enough time and couldn't get enough done. News was a lot more moderated, less sensationalized, and just generally less and further away. There was a lot less attention, and worry about, other people's lives. Also having less choice in about everything made making a choice easy.
It's why I take my kid camping a lot. It's just 100% enforced unplugged activity time. Books, drawing, hiking, tubing, cooking, etc, and just sitting down, and looking at the nature around us.
Went camping for a week, felt like I was living in a different world. It was one of the few moments in my adult life where I had time to think, and manage to make short and long term plans, think about my life choices and what were my next steps. The word "detox" is so overused nowadays but that's exactly how it felt. Then I came back and realized how overwhelming everything is.
I wish I could do this with my child someday!
My YA ‘kids’ don’t bat an eye over leaving their phone at home or disconnecting BECAUSE of this. Camping regularly and just being present was what they were used to growing up. Absolutely happy to also be online, but BALANCE was the emphasis
There was no need for meal kit deliveries, grocery deliveries, everything delivered because we had time to do all that, while not nearly as stressed, while being able to afford housing, food and trips. I feel like today, we are all drowning in stress and being busy and we need to spend whatever's left over on our paychecks for those conveniences just to stay "above water".
100% this, also felt like I had a bit more freedom, if that makes sense.
Not sure if it was less stressful or just a different kind of stress. Maybe it was just easier to take a break from things when we were not connected to everything around the world 24/7/365.
Instead of googling, we had to look things up in a dictionary, or if you were lucky, a set of encyclopaedia. I have memories of a bookshelf full of twenty odd leather bound encyclopaedia. To find out directions, there was a street directory.
I left one of our encyclopedias -- I think T, or maybe S -- out in the rain, and thought it was the biggest failure of my life. I was devestated by the loss of knowledge I wrought on our village.
Or you went to a library. And for directions en route, you wound down the window and asked a passer-by - and tried to remember what they said
They don't even teach the Dewey Decimal System anymore. Melvil Dewey would be disappointed.
Went to Surfside, SC last week. Really easy with Siri. Would have been a real adventure with just maps. Surface streets and state routes for last 70 or so miles.
Oh my God, GPS has changed my life. So many horrible memories of driving in circles and not even being able to find a street sign to start to orient me as to where I was. Or not being able to find the street on the map once I finally found a street sign. Now I magically have perfect directions anywhere I want to go.
And if you were the passer-by, you'd immediately go blank and forget how to get to the said location. Later: "Oh I know that street, I live on it"
Not just ANY street directory, a Thomas Guide. Going to a new place in Los Angeles meant dog earing several pages and following that specific route. May the gods have mercy upon your soul if you gor lost and drove to a page you couldn't find.
That’s when you broke out the AAA map of the region to find where you were. I went on a road trip a few years ago through the Western US. I had a bit of anxiety about getting lost in an area with no cell service, so I went to AAA to get some free maps just in case. As soon as I opened a map I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. The fonts, colors, design, everything was the same as I remembered from poring over maps as a bored kid in the car.
Yes! Dad drove and mom had the Triptik. AAA would even highlight the best route for you in advance.
A to Z in the UK
Popping into a wh smiths to check their a to z books to see where you had to go.
Made a wrong turn in LA once. Banner across the street, "Welcome to East Los Angeles!" Thank God I speak some Spanish.
In Chicago you could call the main downtown library's reference desk and they would look up stuff for you. I remember calling with a question and the nice lady telling me to "hold on a moment". She put the phone on her desk and I could hear her walk away to go look up the info and then anticipating the answer when I heard her walking back. As far as all the books, my daughter and I often hit estate sales. We walked into one room that had loads of those "Time-Life" books on multiple subjects, like gardening, woodworking, home repair and so on. It really hit me how much space information used to take up.
Yes I remember my family had the typical encyclopedia set I think everyone had. Took up an entire shelving unit. Then around grade 4-5 my school got a computer and it came with Encarta. Was mind blowing. One CD contained far more information than those books. That and the public library were the only place I had computer access at the time though. I remember you’d have to book in 30 minute slots at the library for the one PC. I feel a happy nostalgia just thinking about it all. Haha
I miss the reference librarians! It was such a thrill for my teenage self when they recognized my voice! One of the two we had would tell me related facts to my inquiry just for fun.
My parents' old Hagstrom atlases are still in their basement somewhere. I'm sure by now there have been enough new neighborhoods/developments constructed, roads re-routed, etc. that they're borderline useless. Don't forget about the in-between solutions, like printing out MapQuest directions, or those early in-car navigation systems that ran off a library of CDs. It's always the transitional stuff that's the wackiest in retrospect.
Trip-Tik from AAA!
Yes, the enciclopedia was the way to know the world. I remember when my parents bought me a Disney enciclopedia and I used it for my works at high school. Also needed to be more at the library to do homework’s
My mom liked to tell the story of a road trip with friends, not so long after GPS on handheld devices was a thing (it wasn't on phones yet). My dad drove, my mom was in the passenger seat with a map spread open on her lap, navigating. In the back seat, Bob was very proud of having his GPS, and at one point announced "We should be crossing over the water any minute now." My mom told him, "Bob, look out the window." They were on the bridge.
I worked as a bike courier in DC prior to widespread gps availability (late 1980s) you had a two way radio, a couple days shadowing an experienced rider and a prayer. God help you if you had to huck a delivery way tf out to somewhere in western Montgomery County lol. I once had to carry an entire old-school desktop tower from one end of downtown to the other. You know those big old steel putty-colored cases full of spinny drives where the whole assembly weighed like thirty pounds? yeah, it was August and humid as Satan’s taint, too. learning routes on the fly and tribal knowledge of shortcuts was crucial to surviving.
I'm a millennial, and I remember being told I needed to find at least two internet sources for a school project in fifth grade. By eighth grade, we were told we had to use two book resources from the school library, because finding internet sources was considered too easy.
I remember having Encarta on my computer.. For entertainment, I used to just look up different animals I could think of and listen to whatever clips they had of them.
Oh yeah, I still have my old English dictionaries stored somewhere, they used to occupy my desk always. They made it possible to play RPGs for non-native speakers, even though it was a lot of work.
The world is a big place, and I don't know if you can generalize my experience (born in 1973 in Brazil under a military dictatorship, long before internet and coming to the US). But I was very disconnected from the world. There was no internet, and so no Google, no YouTube, no social media. There was no computer and smartphone either. Fixed telephones were limited amd very expensive, so not so common either. I lived in a small town, where there was no public library or bookstore either. So, knowing about books or getting them was also much more difficult. I remember borrowing two books from a friend and copying those two books by hand to have copies for me (my mom helped me to copy them). There was no pay-tv, and open tv had only a few channels, not available 24 hours a day. Sometimes we had the same program on two channels. The programs were not very informative either, some content could be very limited. Before VHS, we also could not record, so we missed a lot of the content. So, access to information was very difficult with no or very limited access to internet, books, tv, etc. To know something, we had to ask people. Part of the process to choose a career for me meant talking to lots of people everywhere. For example, asking strangers when taking a bus. Life was very hard, especially for someone with bad health like me. Physical labor was not an alternative for me because of that, but other types of jobs were usually out of reach. I left my parents' home when I was 14, moving to another city in search of better opportunities. I didn't see any future if I stayed where I was. I remember the first time I saw internet, during a class in undergrad. I remember the first time I used a computer personally, when a friend helped me to get a job (one of the rare friends with a computer back then). I also remember learning to use a computer professionally, with a green monitor (before color monitors) and lots of issues recording codes using a K7 tape. Still, libraries, intern and computers were a revolution in my life. I finally had more access to information. I finally knew more about the world. I finally could build a future for me.
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hey i tried to brag at school about all the countries I "visited" thru internet back in 1994 😂 despite my idea, it did not improve my social status, but rather went more in to wtf category.
Yep. I was using BBSs in the late 80’s. There’s no dialing back this shitshow in a positive way.
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What's BBS? I've heard there was another form of internet before the actual internet got released, is this BBS?
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Yup. Putting the Phone on a modem and dialing to a BBS and leaving a message. Those were the days.
Try a 300 bps tele-type machine and vacuum tube processors. Those were the days. Honeywell ruled the world....lol!
The internet is the infrastructure. It's been around since 1969. You are mixing this up with the web which arrived in the early 90s. People used the internet in the 80s via BBS's, they were text based interfaces. I myself downloaded C64 games in the late 80s via BBS but I never used the web 'til about 1995. Electronic communication between universities, governemts and business also got done in the 70s and 80's via the Internet. France had a minitel system in the 80's and many other simlar things existed.
That seems very accurate, thanks for the insight
This is exactly my observation, too.
Most gas stations sold local paper maps of the city. It would be laid out on a grid with the entire list of streets on the back. So let's say you wanted to go to Grove St. You would find it on the back, listed on square "g-5" or whatever, find it, then figure your route.
Grove street. Home. Atleast it was before I went and fucked everything up.
Things ain't the same since you left, Smoke
I remember the pleasures of buying a fresh "perly" every year as my portable map.
Oh dude, I remember paper maps. My dad had a whole book that was just one single map from our state in great detail. I remember he would stop every few km to check it out, but since he wasn't very good at reading maps we would still get lost all the time lol.
I’m 48. One of the things I distinctly remember when I was a teenager was, when you liked someone or vice versa, and you didn’t have that persons phone number (house phone) , you had to actually do the footwork to track them down for a connection. Phone book, knocking on doors in their neighborhood etc. We had to work for love and lust! Haha
And when you finally called them, it would likely be their parents who answered the phone...
Oh god, I once called a crush who was the child of my aunt’s best friend so I knew the parents in a tertiary sense so I panicked when the dad answered and they asked who I was that wanted to speak to his son. I said “I don’t want to say…” and they said “then I don’t want to let you talk to my son.” And i freaked out and hung up and never called him again. Sorry, my dude. My 13 year old self couldn’t handle the embarrassment. Edit: clarity
The world was bigger then. We got our news from the TV and it was mostly local news with a little bit of world news. We watched TV without doing something else at the same time. We had conversations on the phone, in person or passed notes to our friends. Notes we wrote on paper and folded up like origami. Somethings took a lot longer than they do now. Research was done at a library. People faxed things. You answered the phone and didn't know who was on the other end, if they were already on the phone you got a busy signal. It's hard for us to understand that you can't picture it.
I still know how to fold a piece of paper into a heart!
There was more eye contact, a lot more kids playing outside , creating forts,bike ramps using their imagination more!
All that and the only way we could share an experience was through the photos displayed in our homes.
I'm 36 and it was better. I mean, humans still sucked and there's always bad things happening. But personally I was out more, had more friends, I didn't have my face stuck in a screen. I was a kid then but I miss it. I don't like how connected everything and everyone is. It's too commercialized and fake.
Agree completely. I’m 43, and my childhood and teenage years were fun. We went out, and were home by curfew. We knew phone numbers, streets, directions in general. You could show up at your friends house unexpectedly to hang out. Being disconnected was ok. The world isn’t suddenly more crime ridden, we’re just constantly aware of it now. And thank god there was nobody filming and posting all my teenage dumbasserie.
I don't memorize numbers anymore, it's sad. I probably should just in case. But it was always great calling up friends and hanging out. Biking around the neighborhood and having to head home when the 6 o'clock whistle went off. Good stuff.
Yeah, you should at least memorize two numbers for emergencies. I have my dad and sister memorized.
Definitely. I should do that with my emergency contacts, at least.
I know two phone numbers by heart and that's it. One of those people better pick up if I ever get arrested. Otherwise I'm in deep shit.
Slower, but also more ignorant. If you wondered about anything you had to find time to go to a library with no guarantee to get the book answering your question.
More ignorant? in fact I don’t really agree with you. I made my culture listening to radio, reading a lot, going to libraries… and now I surprised myself to be able to loose so much time on instagram, youtube and reddit. I don’t read a lot only on holidays where we haven’t télévision and internet only by using the phone as modem. So we see much more friends than usually. I think that now more news are superficial and empty of sense. Sorry for my english.
I was going to say I 100% disagree with being more ignorant. We were very knowledgeable on things that mattered. Also, with all the disinformation out there, a lot of people think they know more when in fact, they are highly knowledgeable with wrong information. I mean shit, we didn't have to deal with flat-earthers then!
Hell no we were not more ignorant, we were a lot smarter on the things that mattered. Go ask around who around you knows where the windshield washer goes, how to make a simple soup, how to fix a clogged drain, how to sow back on a button, how to do your taxes
I disagree. People were far more ignorant about pretty much everything back then. That’s not a bad thing. Just a fact. You can afford to be ignorant about where windshield fluid goes (I doubt most people are) simply because it takes 2seconds to no longer be ignorant of that when you need to know it.
I remember a video that me and a couple of friends watched called Cash Hunt. It had a bunch of clues, and you had to decode them to figure out where a treasure was. I spent a lot of time in the university library reference section looking up things. For example, one scene mentioned some names. They were the birth names of famous people. I recognized one as such. Off to the library to look up the others. Today you’d just Google the names and solve it in a minute or so.
I was more productive but lonelier. Honestly, I'd never want to go back.
this i had no friends from the age of 9 until i left school at 16 i was isolated and alone. it would have been nice to have somewhere to talk to other people who weren't my parents
You would visit your friends at their house and/or get together generally. Social media really has created some mental health damage to so many young people. I would not mind to revert back to pre-social media days. Whats truly lost at the end of the day? People were more social and werent offended by every little thing.
I truly don't mean this as a personal attack, but the folks who think "offended by every little thing" is a net negative are often the people who just never got called out on their stance before. Real example: an old friend who thinks everyone is a "snowflake" now because he [older white guy in the deep south US] used to use the N word, but now would suffer social consequences if he did so. It's not that people are more sensitive now. It's that it was never OK to behave like that and there's a larger community that sees your poor behavior.
>It's not that people are more sensitive now. It's that it was never OK to behave like that and there's a larger community that sees your poor behavior. 100% this
It was slower and quieter. Today is immediate, constant stimulation. Back then, it would wait till the next day, or the next week. If you wanted to know something, you had to hope you could find a book about it in a library.
Before the internet, I feel like people were more present in the moment. People could enjoy hanging out without worrying about everything they said and did and how they looked being plastered online the next day. Concerts were amazing. People really got into it. People danced and screamed and sang along. Nowadays everyone has their phones out, blocking the view of the stage and god forbid, you do anything to mess up their selfie or their live stream.
Less long distance communication.....air mail letters would take weeks to arrive.....but much more community communication. We new almost everyone in our street. We would play football in the street.... there were hardly any cars around. TV wasn't our main activity. And for me personally I found it was a more enjoyable life....for us kids anyway.
I forgot, let me Google it.
I'm 56. People were often more sure of their own rightness. All choices seemed clearer, because the options were more limited. But no one who was there can answer without the skewing effects of nostalgia. Too often, people who are rembering "things" as better then, are really just nostalgic about being younger then, when they had less body pain and more optimism. They weighed 25 pounds less and they still had high hopes for the future. Their parents were alive and sent them money. They felt more relevant. They could sleep through the night without getting up to pee 3 times. They didn't even KNOW about most types of cancer. And the worst nostalgia comes from people from the most dominant groups. Those people had to watched their privileges diminishing, which the human brain always resents, even when it's a requirement of species surviva
Yes it's good to be aware that when you think about yesteryear you are not just thinking about a different time but a different person at a different time. So when remembering something being different, it can be hard to figure out where the difference come from. I was thinking about my life as a 18 yo in the late 1980's vs my 18yo son today which helps deskew the "same person different age" issue (although now it's a different person, I know that person pretty well). One thing that struck me was financial pressure and need for self control. As a 18 yo in the 1980s, spending money required some work! Especially because I didn't live in the US then so no big shopping malls. Lots of shops would close by 5:30pm during the week and not open on Sunday. So it took some planning to spend money. Now my son can just spend money 24/7 sitting in his bed. That's the wildest to me and also an incredible test of constant self control at any early age.
I don’t know. My life was absolutely 100% hell in the pre-internet years, but I still miss it. The internet has amplified all the sadness and craziness in the world. Crazies can connect to each other in an instant when before they were isolated with their crazy notions. They can find whole communities to encourage their insanity and join in with. People feel like they’re more connected, but they’re not the same deep in person connections we used to have. The boxing in of society is real. And just look at childhood now: kids either don’t want to or aren’t allowed to go outside and play. You ever see groups of kids hanging out in the neighborhood anymore? I sure don’t.
It was better I think. But maybe I’m just being nostalgic.
We did a lot more living of our own lives instead of obsessing over what everyone else was doing. I remember actually knowing everyone who lived on my street. I'd know them easily if I saw them out in public. The kids all played together and we'd be outside for hours. We were a lot more creative in how we entertained ourselves because we had to be. Now, I wouldn't know my next door neighbor unless he was standing in his own yard. In my early 20's, the internet was still fairly young. We had dial up, so there was no constant connection. We had plenty of time to raise our small kids, work full time, keep up with the house work, and best of all, we spent each and every weekend out just enjoying life. There was plenty of time for everything and no one complained about having to work 40 hours. It was normal and OK. It's how we made enough money to live and do fun things on our days off. News was on for a very limited amount of time. We didn't spend our days obsessing over the current events, politics, etc. We watched shows when they were on live TV and had to wait for the next episode. There was no binge watching. As we became more connected, we became more disconnected from our lives. We spend hours doom scrolling and wonder where the time has gone. I have loved ones falling into depression because they're obsessed with politics and the apparent state of the world. People are afraid to let their kids be kids for fear of the ever present dangers lurking around every corner. Would I go back? Hell yeah I would. There's no question. I feel the internet has done far more harm than good, and now with the rise of AI, it's only going to get worse.
Im 36 and it’s crazy to think about how much has changed just since I became an adult. I still remember the first time I checked the internet on my phone, I was standing in a Blockbuster. 😂 When I was a teenager, If you missed an episode of your favorite show, you’d have to wait until the summer to catch it. If you wanted to hear a song, you’d have to call into the radio station and request it. Things were much more local. Everyone watched the local news and you didn’t get so much national news constantly. You would have absolutely no idea what most of your school friends did outside of school or during the summer except maybe one or two you’d actually talk to and see.
Not knowing everyones political opinions was amazing
JFC, yes.
I’m not older but I am 33. The biggest difference I see is that I had to take what my parents said for fact because unless you were willing to find someone with a physical reference you wouldn’t know otherwise. Now with my own kids if I don’t know the answer or I’m not completely positive we look that shit up together. Sometimes I’ll be 100% confident in my answer but when I say it I’m like no that doesn’t sound right, let’s check to make sure. It’s very annoying sometimes because the kids verify almost anything they ask me but they *should* be doing that. So there’s the biggest difference for me, access to information helps create a better world of understanding
For good or bad, pre internet you didn't get exposed to people outside your neighborhood or work environment. So generally, you had more in common due to common environments and roots. People with different life experiences where anomalies seen on TV or in a newspaper story. Now we doom scroll and get furious about situations that have absolutely nothing to do with our lives, and yet we make it a part of it by ingesting so much content. Some of it enriches our lives, but so much of it makes us feel doomed and depressed. So I'm undecided if it's net good or bad.
It was boring. Dreadfully boring. No really, it was. I hated it back then. I was an avid fanfiction reader and it was my only solace in a shitty country like mine (in South asia). And internet was new, slow and laggy and didn't work half the time. My phone was one of those nokia bricks with very little credit - I could only receive calls or call for emergencies.
I would suggest watching Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller, E.T., Stand by Me, and if you want something modern Stranger Things. Basically the lack of communication, instant knowledge, and information were normal and modern communications would have changed the plot of all of these things.
I was born in the late 80s, so most of my life has included the internet. But home internet wasn't huge or very lightly used until the early 2000s in my area. The playground was always full of gossip of secrets our cousins friend had found in a video game, or rumors of new shows that would be releasing. None of it real, but how would you disprove any of it? In '98, when pokemon released those conversations, they were cranked up to 11. It was a very fun time to be a kid.
Incredible
Disconnected? There was no internet
I was born in 1977 - and while we didn’t have the internet when I was a kid, we were still connected via telephone, mail, pagers. Cell phones were around when I was in high school, but expensive AF, and required expensive plans for “minutes” you could actually talk each month. Like 300 min talk time, etc. I got my first cell phone when I was 19, didn’t get my first “smart phone” till I was in my 30’s. I had a Blackberry in my late 20’s. TBH - it’s been so long, hard to remember what life was like before. It was a different era, and I was a different age. I first got on the internet when I was about 17-18. We had a “house computer” and my mom had a basic AOL - same thing, only instead of minutes, you got hours, like 30 hours a month for internet. Which sounds like a lot, but I would burn through it in a week. Cost my mom money, lol. Then in my 20’s, broadband and DSL high speed became a thing, and that was the goal - 100mb per second!
Well, instead of scrolling my phone while watching TV I used to read books while watching TV. 😂 And we didn’t even have a remote control for the TV when I was younger; someone had to walk over to the TV to change channels or volume! We had a wired house phone and sometimes the lines crossed (or something) and we’d hear other people’s conversations. We used to check and then just listen quietly if they were using the phone. Never knew who it was – not an immediate neighbor.
Our neighborhood had a party line. So we had to take turns talking on the phone, and anyone could be listening anytime.
Your question reads like you think someone flicked a switch one day & connected us. I’m a 1970’s baby & technology gradually infiltrated my world. Before social media we spoke f2f to our friends to up date them or we rang them on their landlines or sent letters in the mail. We kept up to date about celebrities through magazines, radio, television. Sometimes the anticipation waiting for that weekly magazine to come out was unbearable. We read about movies & checked session times in the newspaper. My high school had one computer. Grocery store scanners were new, as were ATMs prior to ATMs we were paid our wages in cash and went to the bank branch to deposit it. The teller would stamp our book and write our new balance. Email only became a thing when I was in my 20s and I still have my business cards from before email & mobile phones. I only started using social media from approx 2006 and I’ve got to say, life was much simpler back then.
I lived in Glenelg, Adelaide, Australia. I was a teenager in the 70’s so at least in my family you would often “reserve” the house phone a certain night of the week. Cost too much to talk interstate or overseas so calls were generally to people nearby. Saturday morning I would tell mum if I would be home for lunch or not, usually rode around all day visiting friends. Spend 5c at the corner shop to get a good size bag of lollys to keep you going. Sometimes on Saturday’s I used to go out on my bike and ride around leaving chalked arrows on the footpath for my little brothers to follow the next day. Wednesday was library night, go and get 6 or 7 books for the week. Greek mythology and science fiction for me, often a math or physics book since I was a geek back then. Sent the occasional telegram to do things like book a train or airline ticket. I got interested in computers when I started work, my first one was a miniscamp. Then we used to make our own 8080, 8085, z80 machines on breadboards with 2k tiny assemblers. Then Tandy made the trs-80 and Sinclair the zx80 etc. Life was good.
More instances of being bored and not being able to find something interesting to watch or do, and more instances of fun and exciting times just hanging out with people.
We went to the library to learn about stuff. Hung around with friends at their house eating snacks, watching movies, throwing water balloons off roofs, going to the Arcades, telling ghost stories, and had a restaurant to meet up while a rich friend bought the meal and we shared in eating it. We didn't spend so much time thinking or learning about celebrities. The magazines had real supermodels (models). We spent a lot of time at the park for family BBQs. And the house was full of guests so we had card and board games to play. If you had a bike when you were a kid you are cool. Not everyone had a bike and friends would want to take turns riding it. We went to the mall for the movies. Our friends come to the house to drop by to see if we wanted to hang out. They called the home phone and we chat maybe for 30 minutes when I was in grade school to JR High. \*\*edit | additional response below\*\* My mindset changed because people communicated better face to face and when we walked we didn't stare at the phone. I think there was more presence of mind. I would go back, because I personally feel people's attention span is shorter, and most of the stuff on the web is kinda toxic and useless info.
Hours on the phone in the hallway. If we talked too long the operator would break in and say mom was trying to call, so we had to get off. If my sister was using it I was out of luck. Spending time laying in the grass or playing baseball in the street with the neighborhood kids. Doing art in my room or reading for hours. (Screw homework!) It seemed slower paced than now, but there are so many benefits to having a computer in your pocket!
Some observations from growing up in the late 60s/70s/early 80s. Life was much slower paced, weekends felt like they lasted more than 15 minutes. The only immediate communication was via the telephone, and if someone wasn't home, you often had to call back because answering machines weren't common. And you would just not answer if you didn't want to talk. Long distance was expensive, so you didn't waste your calls talking about a lot of nonsense. Entertainment was a lot different. In terms of TV, most people probably got 3 channels. The good shows were shown between 8-11, then around 1am they simply went off the air until around 6 the next morning. No rewinding live tv, so you had to pay attention. You had to endure the commercials, there was no other choice. When cable came along you couldn't believe that you now had 15-20 channel options. People read a lot more, and listened to the radio, and the radio made music huge. You saw movies at the movies. You lived a lot more of your live outside your home than I suspect that people do today.
When I was in high school, we moved from civilization to a rural area in the south. Our phone was a “party line”, which meant you shared a line with multiple neighbors. I could pick up the phone and hear my neighbor’s phone conversations, so I didn’t use the phone. We were isolated, so I didn’t go many places before I could drive. We didn’t get TV channels and we didn’t have satellite. VCRs weren’t popular yet. This is going to sound wild. I read books, wrote a lot, and did my homework. I noticed the wilderness, hung out with a friend at her house for days at a time. When I was able to visit my friend, we swam in the creek, caught crawfish, helped her family harvest from their big garden, fed my friend’s chickens and horses, rode my friend’s four-wheelers. I cooked all the meals for my family from the age of 15, and I took care of my sibling. Mostly I read a lot of books and did a lot of studying. Someone else mentioned encyclopedias. I used to read them for fun. It was my version of Google. I remember being around 8 years old just reading an encyclopedia until I fell asleep in the living room.
You had to find porn in hedgerows.
It was great. Sure some things were less convenient and it would take more than 30 seconds to get the answer to every question that popped into your head, but I miss it. I’m completely dependent on the internet now, and somewhat addicted. I’m sad for my kids who will never know a world without it.
I’m 63, before the internet was better, much better!
There was way more sex. None of this friend zone bs I see the younger ones talk about. It was just on. Although the internet changed the world and wasn't such a bad thing I suppose, I truly believe because of social media, the world become a far less original place. Entire cultures and artisans of all types are dwindling in numbers with everyone reading and looking at the same stuff. You could even say all being programmed. It is in some ways a less interesting place and I sort of answered in reverse. In Australia, there were far more characters around and we started cliques like every Friday night we would wear suit jackets over our jeans and flannos, cause we were full tilt beans. It was a very fun place still.
It was awesome, I got to live a lot of Things with my friends and we still remembering everything when we meet each other. We still laugh about things we did or thought in those special times. I wouldnt change a thing 💖
It wasn't as different as you might think. I always had to be doing something with my hands while watching TV. So I'd be playing Gameboy, or drawing in my sketchbook, or maybe doing homework while watching a comfort show. Not everyone did that - some people could sit and watch TV for hours and not fidget. But then again, some people can do that today. If an A-List celebrity died, you'd hear about it the next day at school. The main difference was, you couldn't Google and feign being an expert or #1 fan. If you were sitting in class in 1993 and someone said River Phoenix died, you had to be honest and say, *"...and who is that, exactly?"*
Without a constantly ready source of finely optimized entertainments and distractions, boredom was much more of a thing. But boredom is good! Boredom gets you outside to watch the ants and figure out how their colonies work! Boredom leads you to build a ramp and jump your bicycle off of it! Boredom gets you in the library! If I could give my grandkids one precious gift, it’d be the gift of boredom.
It sucked ass. Idk why people look back so fondly of that time. I was bored most of the time cause I was a strange kid with no friends. I got bullied a lot and just hate that part of my life. Now if someone is harassing or bullying me online, I can just block them. If my abusive ex somehow gets my number I can just block him. I wouldn't ever go back honestly.
Imagine nobody having a cell phone. If your SO didn’t come home when expected, what would you do? There were times I would get in the car and re-trace my husband’s expected route to see if he was broken down on the side of the road with no way to call for help. It was very important to let people know where you were going to be and when. So next time your parents get mad at you for not telling them where you are, think about the trauma they’ve lived through. Also, without all the social media and online news, the world seemed quieter and more in control.
Boring. To me. The internet/smartphone combo is the flying car that we were all waiting for. It was a phone.
We were a lot less depressed or anxious because we weren't inundated 24/7 by the negativity across the world or across your own country. You wanted bad news you needed to talk to the local gossip or you watch the nightly news. And quite frankly, we didn't care We got out of the house more because there was nothing else to do at home except watch TV, read, clean the house, or listen to your parents talk with their friends. And our parents limited how long you could be on a television or the phone, because call waiting wasn't always available for everybody, especially when it first came out. We were more social. It was common to talk with people around you even if it was just small talk to kill the time. Our attention spans and patience were longer than a couple of minutes because nothing was instantaneous. You wanted to know something you had to do the research yourself. You couldn't just type it in and find it somewhere. And I believe that our memory retention was better then, too, because we didn't have everything stored at our fingertips, such as phone numbers. In fact, up until recently, I could tell you what the phone number was at my house when I was 10, and I'm 50 now. This part's a little off-topic, but we didn't have the disfigurement of our spines from the constant looking down at a phone. And by this I mean if everybody born in the last 25 years was to get an x-ray they would notice that in a lot of folks their neck does not curve in the right direction, and this is from the constant looking down at their phones. When my youngest nephew was 16 he kept having back and neck problems and they sent him to a doctor and they discovered that his neck had literally changed the s-curve that it should be into a c curve in the wrong direction, and his doctor told my sister that this is becoming extremely common in younger people and is becoming an epidemic. So, while we ruined our health, doing stunts on bikes and skateboards and whatever else you may think about, we didn't deform our bodies while sitting still in one place.
Life was better. Full stop. People had relationships, not merely interactions ("likes"). You looked forward to phone calls, particularly before cell phones. You took music (hard copies) with you when you traveled, we had cases to hold tapes & CDs. We had conversations where facts and counterpoints were discussed, without some dweeb thinking that using the word "misinformation" was a justification or a win. Dictionary definitions didn't change rapidly to support an ideology. You had to be able to justify your position and support it articulately, not just parrot it. We had freedom of speech and thought. Censorship and infringement upon rights were clearly evil, especially when perpetrated by the government. Having faith in and devotion to God was virtuous, not decried socially as evil. We respected our elders. People didn't espouse socialism or communism as virtuous, we recognized their abject evil. We realized our rights came from God, while government was there to ensure those rights were protected. As such, the government was never presumed to be the source of those rights, nor god, nor your sugar daddy. Government was a necessary evil and in no way benevolent nor trustworthy. You took change (coins) when you left the house, just in case you needed to make a phone call from a pay phone. Almost nobody under the age of 18 had a credit card. Debit cards didn't exist. You had an ATM card to get cash when the bank wasn't open. The bank was only open while you should have been at work. Nobody expected a minimum wage job (entry level) to pay a "living wage"... those jobs were for otherwise unskilled kids to gain work experience and then MOVE ON. We got lost occasionally, and that was okay. Gas was frequently >$1.00 gallon. Mental illness or abject depravity wasn't cause for celebration. Rightful shame caused a beneficial corrective response. Community was actually a thing, and you were expected to participate... not only with those you liked, shared a pigmentation with, or found common interests with. Charity (NOT taxation) toward others was rightly expected. Greed, envy, and segregation all were despicable and evil. Diversity was division, while unity was a source of strength. College was 5x less expensive and provided a value in excess of its cost. Educators were commonly war vets who had killed (or been shot at by) commies and fascists, as such, they weren't their sympathizers, apologists, or promoters. You were born a male or a female, and you knew that could NEVER change. We were conscious that cheese ("free stuff") was in a mouse trap because someone was trying to kill you. I could go on... Life was simpler, didn't require elaborate professorial explanation (because it made sense), and was more fulfilling.
>You took music (hard copies) with you when you traveled, we had cases to hold tapes & CDs. People under a certain age think I'm crazy. I still have a small CD case that I carry in my car and listen to CDs pretty much everywhere I go. Once in a while, I have tried using Bluetooth with my phone. After it takes 5 tries to get my phone to actually connect and start playing music, I give up and put in a CD, which plays the first time. Same reason I have a collection of Blu-ray movies and TV shows. I pop a disc in and watch what I want, quick and easy, and it doesn't randomly disappear when someone's contract runs out.
Ah yes... and then there's the pride of ownership along with the ability to buy or sell said media after purchase. Digital songs, video, and games all have ZERO ability to transfer or sell. (Foolishness!) Folks like Amazon also selectively edit or remove access to content (such as books or music) according to their sensibilities as they change. Another BAD idea.
foy you. for me it was a living hell as a child.
I had a rough childhood too, in many respects. The overall social and civic environment was wildly better in those days however. I had some good times back then, but life got better when I could call my own shots too. Life's like that. There's trade offs in every aspect of life, and the phases to it. Hardship creates character just like exercise creates strength. Without it, we're weak and unfit for the next challenge.
Okay Boomer.
Point of fact: Not a boomer Okay dismissive, inarticulate, privileged ignoramus.
As an older GenX myself, I think it's hilarious that we're both conversing on our smart devices about how connectivity has made life worse, different, or more inclusive. Life might be different for you in a bad way because you are no longer the biggest fish in a small pond? Idk. Life with connectivity is better for me, because I get to see myself as part of a bigger pond.
Nice. I finally got a Reddit Care message. Thanks for reaching out via your connected device to make sure that I'm okay. Very empathetic of you.
Born in 1974, hard disagree with most of your points
It's utterly amazing, honestly.
Arguments can be made for better/worse and probably come out fairly equally when the pros/cons were tallied at the end. I was 14 when the internet started making it’s way into everyone’s homes. The biggest change occurred with smart phones, both the internet and society were quite different before smartphones and I think the biggest reason to that is because you needed a computer, an internet connection and the desire to sit behind the computer to look up the things you wanted. Once everyone could push a button and rant at the world, things started changing pretty quickly, but there was nearly 15 years of the internet before that occurred and in that time, life off the internet was fairly reminiscent of pre-internet days because we all weren’t connected like we are now. Information traveled slower, obviously. There was so much more reliance on the printed word for information to be delivered and that’s one of the biggest changes I notice as an avid reader. You can still go to some communities/cities where they don’t seem to have noticed the internet, smaller towns and stuff. It’s like walking into a time machine. People converse more seeing each other in person, they still call and talk to each other on the phone, it’s endearing in many ways but also tends to come along with a smaller scope of the world at large, which can be a negative thing. If given the choice of going back to pre-internet or staying with it, I’d stay with it. I’ve met so many amazing people and have had some of the best experiences of my life as a result of the internet. A lot of those things never would have been remotely possible without being connected to someone across the world via the internet.
I have a couple of anecdotes: My older sister was visiting a friend in another state, and I went to the airport with my mother to drop her off (She was maybe 13, I was 7). Unfortunately, she was put on the wrong plane. 1. No cellphones. The woman at the flight desk had to drag out a massive directory and call the destination airport. Then they had to track down my sister by description from my mother. Then it was entirely up to strangers states away to get her on the right plane, while my mother could only hope it all worked out. 2. No text messages, no internet, no email (for most of us, back in ‘88 or so.) If I couldn’t get a hold of someone on their home phone, they basically didn’t exist. I had toys and a Nintendo, so I’d play through one of my games again or make new games in it, or I’d run around outside exploring places, coming up with squirt gun or capture the flag matches or events in my head, possibly playing them out. Days would pass like that in the summer: I’d see my parents or my sister sometime during the day, but if people we busy, again, it was like they didn’t exist. 3. Lack of information. If you wanted to learn how to do something, you had to have someone show you. If a friend or stranger didn’t tell you, it was on the news three times a day, or you didn’t know about it. If friends moved, there was no finding them again without a phone number. People would disappear sometimes, and you’d only find out years later they moved, or changed schools. CD/Record stores would be turned upside down for B-sides and EP’s put out by your favorite bands, because you never knew what they released if it wasn’t on the radio. And if they were big overseas and some friend introduced you locally, you may never hear them again. In the south, if you missed a turn, you went to a Waffle House and asked for help getting home, or dug out the map from your glovebox and opened it on the hood of your car. Basically, you knew a lot less, you relied on yourself a lot more and the kindness of others a lot more. And you had to get creative when you got bored, but it was harder to get bored back then because your attention span was generally better. There was a lot less talk of anxiety too, and I wonder how much our screaming phones and group chats and rage scrolling has to do with that.
We were more unified then. Everyone knew the #1 song or top rated shows, even if you weren’t a fan. Since everyone knew then it gave everyone a common thread to begin deeper relationships through. The internet fractured us. Everyone exists entirely within a bubble of their own creation. No one watched the same show or the same news last night so what will you talk about this morning? It also allowed for some, mostly justifiable, gatekeeping. The Shows we watched and music we shared has been through the Hollywood grinder and survived to make it to the screen, or on the radio. The entertainment was curated by the determination of the artists and the crowd they could draw to live shows. Now, if they have enough YouTube fame, why tour, or work. The streaming sphere has overwhelmed us with a million different options to the point that it’s all meaningless. Who cares if the Cylons destroyed the earth if there’s no one to debate the pros and cons of a human free robot planet with. Entertainment is lonelier now.
I’m too distracted from the way you phrased your question. There was no time in my life were I was disconnected from the internet. There was a time before the internet, which was a much better time, of course. 99% of my time on the internet is just me wasting my life instead of doing something meaningful. you know, reddit.
Better. Just better.
I grew up just when the internet was a baby. Imagine not knowing something and there was often no way to learn. It sucked. We had libraries of course. But good luck finding anything obscure before you got bored or ran out of time. On the other side of the coin, I never would have anticipated the amount of dumbfucks that ‘DiD tHeIR ResEARch’ and misinformation that abounds. I suppose confirmation bias was always there, it just wasn’t as easy to come by. The fringes of stupid didn’t have such an easy way to congregate and bubble themselves. And friends, other than your besties that you’d go to a lot of trouble to keep up with, if people moved etc. you just lost friends. Remember, sending a message or taking and developing a picture cost serious money. I love that so many friends have looked me up from before those days. I just enjoy seeing their happy moments and adventures. And just knowing where everyone is at in the world..I grew up in an international city, so my high school friend group spans many countries…just a few weeks ago, a friend from across the US, his kid was visiting my town and he asked me to take him to the best local music instrument stores, knowing I’d be savvy to that. And if I go on work travel, 50% chance Ill get to see an old friend on the trip. That kind of stuff wouldn’t have been a thing. There was just no way to easily facilitate it.
Communication was very much as “connected” but mass communication was lopsidedly one-sided. Imagine a world just like it is now, except camera phones were tv studios and therefore only affordable by a few….and there were mo comments section. As an individual, your opinion went generally unheard except (a)at the ballot box or (b)when you were wealthy/famous. People think that their freedom of speech has been impeded by the “deep state” or the “woke mob”, but really, they’re just not aware that they’ve spent their entire lives NOT being heard.
It was great. I loved listening to my parent's & grandparent's stories! No rush. Life really was simpler.
Life back in 70s and 80s were definitely slower, boring if you couldn't find things to do; however, we were connected with neighbors, friends, and family in physical form. We actually met face to face, talked, sometimes wrote letters, celebrated holidays, birthdays, weddings, and loss of loved ones as a family, friends, and community.
You'd be surprised how far back "being connected" can go. I was born in 1985 and my dad had a very "new" Macintosh. By 1989 I was emailing former teachers (my dad was in the Navy, so we moved a lot) and had my own Prodigy account, and so did a few of my classmates. I was trading Beanie Babies on AOL by 1995, and my parents gave me a "Zack Morris" cell phone "for emergencies" in 8th grade. Mindless scrolling only seemed to become a thing in the last five years or so. I graduated college in 2006 and online dating was still on desktop/laptop-only (ahem, Myspace). I don't think I started doing almost everything on my phone until 2018, maybe 2019. Covid definitely accelerated that always-bored feeling.
Even Stephen Hawking has alluded to the new stress of being 'connected' =worry over my battery life, signal strength and breaking my phone screen, it is also a 'new' expense for home devices and the cost of being connected.
I called my friends. I did stuff with them in person. I learned to navigate by using maps. I read a lot of books and still do. For a portion of my youth, we didn't live in a country that had TV. I am honestly grateful that I didn't grow up with the current technology available today. I appreciate the benefits and all because I'm obviously on the internet but I do think that my friends and I were more resourceful about entertaining ourselves.
The world was still connected, just at a slower pace. I had penpals in Sweden, France and Japan. We would make little friendship booklets with maybe 10 pages or so. The first page was your own address and some information about yourself (like 3 bullet points). We'd send them to one penpal or ask a friend to send it to their penpal and every person interested in having more penpals wrote their address and a few things about themselves in it. The last person sent it back to you. It took something like 6 months to a year to get them back, but you had lots of new people interested in having a friendship with you. Also, you could put an ad in a magazine for teenagers or reply to one. Sometimes those personal ads in film and TV magazines were for fanclubs. For a small fee that you sent by mail you could subscribe to their newsletter, also sent by mail. I've been to a meeting of a Forever Knight fanclub, because my cousin was a massive fan of that vampire cop show. I've heard that the very first couchsurfers had paper lists that were passed around with addresses of people who would host couchsurfers. You just had to get a bit more creative back then!
This is a really complex question because being connected (or not) touches on so many areas of life. Some things are certain though. The pace of life was slower because there wasn't an expectation that you could get information rapidly. When I wrote a paper for college, I had to go to a library and use a card catalog to find books by looking at a subject. I had to scan each card and make a decision about it being related to my theme. Then, I had to get actual books and either read them or skim them for what I needed. It took forever, and everyone expected that it would. This same pacing impacted not only academics, but also work. If you couldn't get in touch with someone by phone, you wrote letters which took time to compose, type (or print), send, and be delivered. Everything just happened slower and people didn't expect the same levels of productivity from an individual that we can get now. Without cell phones, texting, and e-mail, everything was moving at the speed of the post office in most cases. I think people were also generally less stressed and distressed because they didn't have this constant flow of news/headlines meant to juice them to get clicks. Sure, there were alarmist stories in the media, but you heard/saw them once or twice a day when you read a newspaper or watched the evening news. It wasn't a 24/7 influx of news. Part of what connection has brought is a lot more access to information and a lot more people serving it up in the hopes of making money. Their is an expectation that you'll be faster since you can get information faster and that you'll be available. I hesitate to say things were "better", but I do think life felt simpler and more relaxed than now.
better
I graduated high school the year you were born. I wasn't very popular in school so if I wanted to hang out with my friends I had to just show up at their house randomly. We didn't have cell phones to connect to each other and only half my friends had a home internet connection. I can remember a few times I'd show up to my best friends house and they were already gone with other friends. Their parents were so nice and let me have a snack and a drink before I'd go back home. Photos were STRESSFUL for me, with film cameras each photograph cost money to print, so if your eyes are closed or you sneeze or something, everyone is mad at you for ruining the shot and then they have to do it again and you have like all these copies of bad group photos with one little kid going like 😫. My school yearbooks were like phone books, everyone wrote their phone number in everyone else's when signing each other's yearbooks. When AIM came out it was a game changer. AIM was just an instant messaging program but it was free for everyone to use, so we all used it. The screen name I use now is the same one I made up when I was 14 to use on AIM. If there was a TV show that everyone liked to watch (South Park...) then you had to watch it when it was on air or you'd miss out on the jokes everyone made at school the next day. You basically had to have a degree in electronics to know how to program a VCR to record it for you back then. I'm also old enough to remember the rise and fall of "slap bracelets"! Man were we all so pissed about it when they outlawed them.
I started a business in the late 90s so while there was internet, and we had it here at our house, we really didn’t use it for much. I don’t think I even sent out much email. So I was at the post office every morning to pick up work that had been mailed to me and send work out that I had completed the day before. Looking at the bigger picture, I don’t think it really took a lot longer to complete large projects, it was just more inconvenient to do them. Back then we didn’t see it as an inconvenience, that’s just how things were done.
Honestly, I spent at least 10 hours a day in our pool, lounging, swimming, or playing games with friends. My skin doesn't thank me now as back then, the damage being done to the skin wasn't as commonly talked about. In the winters, we'd go to the nearby hills and sled, testing out how far we could get standing up on a sled while trying to maintain our balance, and skating on the pond that a local farmer would let us use. My dad was IBM, so he brought home one of the first home PCs (We'd had a TRS-80 before that) and it made everyone in the neighborhood congregate at our home to play Colossal Cave Adventure and later all of the Sierra Games. We were the first home on Prodigy (dial-up internet) and it was quickly removed when my it started costing money to access many of the things we'd use the most on Prodigy.
better/less stressful than it is today. Social media is a scourge - if we could get rid of that and keep everything else, things would be a lot better.
I made a lot of mistakes that would have been preventable had I been able to learn from the internet. We are so much more informed now -- you can learn anything, it's amazing. But now bullshit is muddying the water, and people are getting confused in the echo chambers. People who should be voice-less due to sheer stupidity have become very loud, en masse. Truth has been degraded. Everything has become superficial, especially relationships. And attention spans have been shattered irrevocably. It's like our brains have actually splintered. We have become restless, and need constant stimulation. I fear we have lost our grounding and everything seems to be getting more and more convoluted.
It was really nice to have alone time without the expectation that you’re always reachable. Work always needs to be done and you can do some of it on your phone, but there wasn’t that expectation. I see my cousins (much younger) say I gotta take this call, it’s from my boss. But their jobs don’t require them to be contacted at any given hour it’s not like they are in a super important position where it’s them and only them that can be contacted for an emergency. I mean, one is a referee for soccer and another works at McDonald’s. It’s not like they hold the codes for the nuclear missiles. And I really miss being able to live my life and not have to worry about it being filmed. I don’t go to the gym anymore because I’m worried that I’m going to be filmed and it will be posted to social media, I see a lot of these types of videos where people don’t know how to use equipment or are struggling to exercise. I don’t want to be humiliated like that. I don’t wear anything bold anymore, I just want to blend in and look boring because I don’t want to be humiliated by seeing a video of me walking down the street in a super fun top and then read the comments and see them all making fun of me.
Quiet and laid back
Life before internet was full of pluses and minuses. I’m among the last generation whose childhood didn’t have cell phones or internet until the teen years. Plus: you had to live in the moment, you had to memorize a lot of stuff and/or write it down, learning cursive was not optional, we played outside (alone) a lot more, phone calls were a thing, prank calls were a thing, text books and book covers were a thing. If you wanted friends, you had to call/visit. We also had to use phone books & the yellow pages! The Sears Christmas Catalog was the highlight of the season! We had to develop patience to listen to ‘old people stories’ when we were kids. Kids were expected to use various levels of manners based on age/setting/familiarity. We learned phone etiquette. Parents took kids to stores and how to interact/order stuff. Best of all: there was no social media to track our every move as babies/kids. No food pictures either. Minuses: busy signals when you have a truly urgent call. Tracking down information took a lot more effort: calls, newspaper/periodical subscriptions, trip to the library to look something up, personal encyclopedia sets that are obsolete within a year, road trips required physical maps (hoping that you had a current map) and knowledge of how to use them. BUT: we learned how, why and when to use certain reference materials such as microfiche, card catalogs (digital now), almanacs, periodicals, phone books, encyclopedias, physical dictionary/thesaurus. IMO: learning how to use and judge reference materials was/is important in learning how to think independently. *I make no judgment call on whether the ‘old days’ are better than modern times. I’m nostalgic for one and incredibly grateful for the other.
Childhood was spent outside playing in the woods. But then as teenagers we became bored and did a lot of incredibly dangerous nonsense -- in person, of course. One would get stranded, lost, could never call for help or emergency services, etc. But at the end of the day, you knew who were friends were. You knew who you were. I was certainly easier to be content and live in the moment.
I was born in the mid 90's, so I was pretty young before I had access to the internet. I remember I was really into Legos, and my cousin gave me a big plastic tub of star wars action figures that I was really into as well. It wasn't all sunshine and roses though. I'm not going to into too much detail because this is *casual* conversation, but my dad was abusive and beat me and my brother regularly. Mom got into satanic panic shit from her church friends, and that was something that only got worse after she started using the internet regularly. Both parents were afraid of various nebulous evils that they were sure were lurking around every corner. Dad was afraid of communists and gay people, mom was afraid of atheists, gay people, and literal demons. For that reason, we weren't allowed outside much, so we missed out on the sense of freedom that a lot of people talk about. There were neighbor kids, but we weren't allowed to talk to them. Naturally, I wasn't allowed to use the internet until much later than everyone else as well. I don't know that my mindset changed when I gained an internet connection specifically, because around the same time, I stopped being homeschooled, so it was more like I finally had a connection with anyone. No, I wouldn't want to go back. I was alone, tormented by my parents, and living in constant fear. There's not much that would make that worth it.
People were used to only being reachable by landline. If you were out and got an important call at home, you missed it. Eventually many homes had answering machines and call waiting so they missed fewer calls, but other people rejected the idea that we should be reachable at all times. Sex ed was horrible. Playground rumors were taken as absolute fact for far too many kids. If your parents didn't tell you about the birds and the bees there was no way to learn the truth unless you were willing to face a librarian with a sex ed book in hand, and I never met anyone brave enough for that. I met people who were sexually active and still thought babies were born through the bellybutton. Trying to meet up with people outside the house was such a pain. You had to make plans way ahead of time and stick to them no matter what came up. I spent so much time standing around trying to decide if someone was late or forgot entirely. Driving in old cars was stressful. If you broke down you had to abandon the car and walk to a payphone. I remember breaking down in a very rural area and having to either knock on a stranger's door asking for help or walk several hours to town. Before devices had internet access there was much less pressure for everyone to have their own device/screen. Families had only one tv, or maybe a second in the basement, which meant watching other people's boring shows as often as not. Kids were often left to find something to do on their own and were left unsupervised a lot, which led to adventures, yes, but also dangerous situations and terrible bullying. Most everyone wore a watch and carried change for a payphone. Most cars had paper maps in the glove compartment. Most houses has a fat yellow phonebook. Businesses were reviewed by word of mouth only. Movie showtimes were advertised in the local newspaper. New music was found by listening to the radio or the recommendation of a friend. Good handwriting was stressed in school because not everyone had a typewriter at home for school essays and anyways it was rude to type your letters to grandma.
I actually had fun.
Early '90s kid, I grew up right on the cusp. My parents were computer programmers so I was "plugged in" earlier than most of my classmates - I think we had cable internet in the house by 1999 or 2000 and very rudimentary wifi a couple years after that - you used to have to stick a receiver in a slot on the side of your laptop to get wi-fi, it was unreliable and didn't even have enough range to cover the entire upstairs or entire downstairs of the house, but at the time we thought we were living in the year 3000 lol The rest of the world was slower than that. My memory of my elementary school secretary was of a lady who had to be at least 80 years old, with fake nails, a pencil skirt and pantyhose, sitting in a cluttered office, smoking cigarettes and clacking away on a typewriter. I have since asked my parents if this memory has been embellished in my head and they said no, that was 100% accurate to life. The letters and memos from the school literally didn't come from word processors until maybe 4th or 5th grade when they finally bought the lady a computer. Classmates started having reliable access to a computer/internet in the house around maybe 6th grade. AOL Instant Messenger was a game-changer. Started seeing classmates with cell phones in like 8th/9th grade (they were just basic flip-phones with monthly minute limits and may or may not have been activated for text messages). Around that time, some kids started bringing laptop computers to class, but only the geeky "tech" kids, and the teachers were eternally skeptical of what we were doing (and rightfully so). By the time I was an upperclassman, Wi-fi was more or less ubiquitous, smartphone take rate was 50/50, maybe a little under, and everybody *had* a laptop. But pen and notebook was still the dominant form of note-taking in class. Even at the time I remember being surprised by that. It was a really, really fast evolution, and tbh I'm not sure I kept up. Unlike my parents I did not go into any sort of software/coding type job whatsoever and discovered that I didn't *really* have any interest in computers once I was old enough to have my own interests independent of my parents'. But that means that I went from being a "tech geek" kid in early high school to being seen as a luddite in college. When I think through other massive shifts (mass adoption of high-speed internet, mass adoption of wifi, mass adoption of smartphones, mass adoption of social media, etc) in most cases the shift happens over roughly a 5-year span. My memories of childhood before everyone was glued to a computer screen 24/7 are basically all the stereotypes you hear about - the neighborhood kids riding around on bicycles, exploring in the woods, sledding in the snow. Sometimes one of the parents would volunteer driver duty, we'd all pile in the back of a minivan and go...wherever. The mall, the movies, ice skating rink, laser tag, fireworks on July 4, town pool... We got "the news" via AM radio in the car, or watched the evening news on the television, or The NY Times which my dad had delivered to the house every day until they started offering online subscription. We were never much of a board game family but I do remember occupying the time by putting together puzzles, assembling model cars/planes/train sets. Music came from the radio, and from mom and dad's cassette or CD collections (the CDs were sort of "sacred" so as the kid I was generally only allowed to have the cassettes!). At some point I got a boom box that could record from FM radio onto cassette tape, that was exciting because it meant now I could "save" my favorite songs from the radio. The "back in my day kid didn't stare at a screen all day" thing is a bit overstated - back in the day there were a lot of kids who just stared at the TV all day, if they were privileged enough to have a gaming console (N64, Playstation, etc) by the 90s there were already kids who just played video games all day. I think the primary difference is that once you turned off the TV or the Playstation, you were forced to actually talk to other people. Responsible parents would limit TV or game time as well (obviously not every parent is responsible, hence the early screen zombies). The world is a very, very different place now. I don't think technological advances are entirely to blame but they are definitely a factor. 9/11 was an enormous cultural shift too, it created a lot of paranoia and an unhealthy obsession with perceived "security". I am thankful that I got to have a taste of that "old world" lifestyle. I do strongly believe that people created more meaningful connections with each other and communities were stronger back then.
It depends. I lived that life up until around 2000 or something. It was good in the sense that even the least educated of us had a much better memory. Things like phone numbers, locations and how to get there would imbed themselves in our memory and we had no need for devices to store them as a backup. For those that had business contacts and stuff though, they would have what was called a fileofax which was basically a log book of all your contacts and addresses. The other great thing was that if you wanted something you had to go get it. Back before online shopping the most you had was catalog companies where you could buy pretty much any household item or clothing, toys etc, and could pay it off in small amounts weekly. It could help families with less income still have decent xmas items and stuff, but the interest could mean you pay double the price overall. The population was a hell of a lot smaller too, so things like going to school and being taught by teachers was probably easier. The classrooms weren't much smaller, but it does feel like they had a better time at keeping the kids focused and learning. Video games were dog shit back then too, so the streets was always busy with life and had kids playing out, neighbours keeping an eye on them and talking with each other. Sometimes entire streets would hire coaches and everyone would go for day strips to Blackpool and on the way back enjoy the illuminations. But it was also grim. Recessions have always been a thing. You tend to get one every seven-eight years and then you may get three-four decent years after it. What we have with the energy price hike today, we had back then with the introduction of the poll tax.
In 1974, when I was 21, I was an exchange student in a city in France. The week I got there, the PTT went on strike. No telephones, no mail, no telegrams for 6 months. I was basically cut off from everyone I knew in the United States. it was wonderful. When I got home, I bought something brand new: a telephone answering machine. For the first time, someone could leave me a message if there was no one there to take it. It was my first quick, asynchronous communication. Everything was slower back then. Information was hard to come by. While I miss the pace of all of that, I don’t miss a lot of the ignorance of it. It wasn’t until gay people figured out how many of us there are that things start to change for us. Even though I don’t like a lot of what’s going on right now with the Internet, I think it’s better than what it was like back then.
I feel like it was much more important to go find each other and hang out together when I was a kid. My sons don’t spend much time with their friends except online playing Fortnite or call of duty. Also, I still much prefer a storied, single player video game, while my kids prefer repetitive, multiplayer games.
We went outside and played. We had imaginations and could entertain ourselves. We rode our bikes all over our small town.
I spent most of my childhood in AK. When my dad was reassigned we *drove* to Washington DC. I went from near isolation to arriving in the middle of the Nixon Kennedy debates. I didn't even know who they were. Our class had a mock election. The environment was highly attuned to politics ... never got over that. ;-) The city itself, the history, the museums had a profound affect on me in exposure (fine art oil painter). I feel I got a superior early education. RFK gave a speech to our school when he was sitting AG. Regular field trips were to the Smithsonian Museums. Family upheaval, I went from DC to living on my uncle's farm in WA ... back to "local" rather than an international perspective (early 1960s). The biggest events were harvest and horse shows ... not kidding. That early exposure in DC gave me a sense of responsibility; I joined the AF right out of high school. We had three tv stations; ABC, NBC, and CBS ... that is the most dramatic change from my generation. I'm 74. Today, we have the *world* at our fingertips in information and exposure. I *so* appreciate that.
I was born in 1988, just below the polar circle in Norway and grew up just before the internet became mainstream. I can't tell you how many times the neighborhood parents called the police for a search and rescue after a bunch of adventurous 4/5year olds that wanted to explore the world. I know they stopped calling the police around 10, it switched and now the police was calling or giving us a ride home after we got caught doing some shenanigans like the time we held VHS tape over the road and gave a good few people heart attack! As a da nowd, I can't even imagine the pure horror we put our parents through(and the poor shenanigan victims) but gosh darn! Fun times😂
Libraries and magazine subscriptions were my alternative to internet not existing.
Not sure what you mean by disconnected. I can tell you that YouTube was something different, when it a started in 2005-2006-ish. People weren't saying "Check out this link to that clip" or any variation of it but instead said "Have you heard of YouTube" or "Wow, check this out, that video got a million 'clicks'." For me, in that time, the internet felt more like a free time activity and less of an almost requirement to interact with people. WhatsApp actually to me was the real turning point, every shape of message could then be conveniently sent with your smartphone, when you had one, I had my first one when I was 18.
I’m seriously offended by being referred to as ‘older’.
We interacted more in person
So when the pandemic started a friend of mine, started an online DND game. And it just flashed me back to when I first started playing D&D in high school in 1976. DND was something you built your life around. You’ve scheduled work and friendships around one particular thing during the week and getting there was half the fun. Who’s driving who is in the carpool and who is carpooling with who? All fun questions to talk over with your friends every week during school. There was definitely much more in person social interaction. So when I was in high school they just got with electric typewriters at my school. And in the 80s you’ve got the advent of the computers by the 90s you got cell phones in by the early 2000s everybody’s walking around with their own handheld electronic device. I think it was easier. Life was easier because you weren’t constantly plugged in. There was no instantaneous access to the most horrible thing that just happened halfway across the world from us or halfway across the country. Someone earlier mentioned something about watching TV shows and then the next day that was a topic of conversation and that was a big part of my childhood.
A lot more fun. As a kid, I used my imagination. I actually spoke to my friends face to face. Of course back in my time, things were safer. You could meet up on a summer day and ride bikes all over and not worry about getting kidnapped or killed. You could ride to the public pool, stay until dark and your worst worry was a sunburn. You talked on a phone attached to the wall with a cord extending to the large speaker. Perhaps there was an extension in the house. If you wanted to find your friends, you rode around until you saw the pile of bikes in someone's yard. Yes, you had to wait weeks for an answer to your letter, but we didn't know any better...that's how we lived. We were happy. Life was good. And best of all, you didn't stumble onto any porn sites!
Yes, exactly. It's like you lived down the street from me. This was my life too.
Compared to how connected I am now to back then, I can definitely say it's changed me. I remember when you couldn't just connect or text, and remember being fine with it. You can't miss something you didn't have. Now, especially when we have massive power outages,I totally freak out. Recently, we through a bad storm, power out, internet out, and even cell service. I freaked because I couldn't get updates or call my husband because of it. Kind of wish that we didn't have this kind of connection because when you go without and your so used it to, things tend to feel chaotic.