According to a new Harris Poll shared exclusively with Fast Company, most Americans would prefer to live in a simpler era before everyone was obsessed with screens and social media, and this sentiment is especially strong among older millennials and Gen Xers.
Asked whether they would like to return to a time before humanity was “plugged in”—meaning before people had wide access to the internet and smartphones—77% of Americans age 35-54 said they would, the highest of any group.
I found these numbers very strange. As a Boomer I consider the internet great. [However I have almost no interest in smartphones. I carry one for emergencies such as a car breakdown. But it is shut off unless I am making a call. My landline is otherwise sufficient for my phone needs.]
It’s not a surprise that people just want to go back to the good old days, when [insert modern problem] didn’t exist, because that’s what people have always been saying. Today’s problems are imminent and intense, and yesterday’s are barely remembered, and they were thin and their knees didn’t hurt and they had a full head of hair, so of course it was obviously a better time.
I’m close to six years older than you, and would gladly go back. I still prefer books, magazines and newspapers for information, and have no problem entertaining myself with 'em. They keep me out of ennui just fine, like they always did. The internet is vast but really quite shallow, like a million square mile wading pool with concentration-killing chemicals in the water.
I can get all of those on the internet, and a lot more easily than by going to the library and hoping they have a microfiche of a copy from seven years ago that has the information I’m looking for, or that the book I need hasn’t been checked out.
I’d go back… as an early 40s guy I remember when there was a mystery to the world and a general feeling that things get better over time. No one predicted that the internet would allow everyone to live in their own virtual reality of facts so well that any general progress is stopped.
I was born in 1969. I was on the internet before it was called the internet.
The modern internet-driven culture sucks because people suck — and people have always sucked. I remember junior high and high school when racist and homophobic jokes were spread via word of mouth instead of via messaging apps. The only thing that has changed is scale and speed.
But the thing is, modern tech makes this kind of awful behavior much more transparent and visible. And that has resulted in increasing awareness, and some sporadic momentum for cultural reform. Previously, very little of the bullshit was put in writing or recorded on video, and was underground and deniable despite being so common and widespread. That has changed, not without pushback, but it’s a good change overall I think.
As a Gen-X-er, I would certainly not want to “go back.” Good and bad is always part of the world. All we can do is adapt and move forward. Technological innovation doesn’t make us terrible, it just exposes how terrible we already were, and it’s up to us how we deal with that.
I know a guy who hates computers and thinks he would have been happier in the 1940s (except for the whole war thing).
I do not know if there is a commonly-agreed-upon consensus date but by the mid-1990s, or even before, it was clear that “Internet culture” was a total non-starter. However, technology is no more nor less than what you make of it, and it enables people to make actual advances as well as it enables other people to waste their time and be exploited with ease.
I mean around the mid-'90s or so, when the web was starting to take off and the general public could get internet access through AOL or the local phone company or a freenet without having to be a college student or a professional.
Not to dismiss all the objective improvements brought by the internet… But before the internet, it took more effort to collect information – so that information was more valuable. What’s more, people learned in part from talking to each other in person, and that made social interaction more important.
This, precisely. I, too, am Gen X, and I was online before the Internet existed. I have no desire to go back to the “good old days”. They weren’t good, only old. The difference now is chiefly that we can see the rot in our culture–and seeing it at least gives us a shot at dealing with it.
In those days people want to go back to, bigotry was so entrenched in my town that no one even seemed to register that open racism was something to be embarrassed about. Of the only two guys I knew to be gay there, one committed suicide and the other was fired from his job, blacklisted, and driven out of town. I had to physically defend a friend who was Catholic because one of the local schism-spawn churches got it into their heads that Catholics were all Satan-worshippers and needed to have the devils beaten out of them. The town was a one-stop shop for hate and abuse.
And no one outside that particular backwater ever heard anything about this. Today, there would be ways to get the word out. Articles would be published, maybe interviews. Someone would have captured video of incidents and shared it. And even if the light shining in didn’t drive the roaches back into the woodwork, it would have shown more people a way out of the misery.
Now the evil is spread before us in all its ugliness, and I understand the impulse to turn away. It’s an awful sight. But that awfulness has always been there, just out of sight. Just out of mind. Now that we can’t help but see it, a lot of people are trying to clean it up, and things have gotten better in many ways. Trying to turn back the clock can only make them worse again.
I love the idea that we’re so nicely wired, able to communicate. Able to participate in media. I wish it were more democratic (still) but it’s so much better than it was. I wish the conversations were treated less as trivial; for all that people rant about anger and judgment on the internet, the main thing that annoys me is that we’re dismissive. We take issues seriously but we don’t take ourselves seriously and realize what this communications capability can mean for us.
I don’t tend to carry around a cell phone. I’m immersed enough by the computer. It seems to me that the cell phone’s modality is fit for Twitter; I’m fit for writing term papers and equivalent. Even with the computer I have to make an effort to look up out of it and have a life beyond it.
I’ve got the typical fogey attitude that I know ways and my ways have worked well for me, and I like to build on what i know instead of having to start over with some other methods. But no, I want more progress. I’m all in on getting wired up interactively.
Heck no, I love the internet. I hate some of the stuff on the internet, but the internet itself, its connectivity, its human-knowledge-at-your-fingertips is wonderful. I’m quite happy about modern gadgets, even if I’m selective in the ones I personally acquire. There are many areas where technology has made life better.
But then, I have chosen NOT to spend hours a day in social media. I don’t live on my smartphone. I still live a large part of my life in the “good old days” by my own choice, while still having access to the 21st Century. Best of both worlds.
There are untold masses of books / reports / documents / articles etc. that aren’t on the internet, and likely never will be digitized. Sadly, I come to the end of the internet all too often, and printed materials are needed to get anywhere interesting / rewarding.
I wish some things could be like they were before, but they don’t have to do with the Internet. Most things are the same or better with the Internet than without it.
The closest thing that I’d like to go back to is shopping for physical items (or maybe that is what is in my mind since in another thread we are talking about what you can’t find in stores anymore.)
But non-physical items like tickets and digitized music are much better to buy on the Internet. And even for physical items, what I’d prefer is to be able to research items and look things up on the Internet to see where items are available, and then go pick them up the same day without having to worry about shipping or the clothes fitting. But that only comes into play a few times a year.
As for the sweet lack of needing to go to the local library, we wouldn’t have the global obesity pandemic at the level it hovers, lard-powered, if people needed to ugh…walk to learn about stuff.
Born in 1967 and not going back. I’m communicating right now with people all over the world – it’s amazing! I can listen to just about every song ever recorded using a device in my pocket. Every fact, every objective question can be answered almost immediately.
I stay away from unhealthy social media (very little politics, mostly just jokes on my various feeds), so that stuff doesn’t bother me.
And similarly untold masses that are and wouldn’t realistically be accessible to the ordinary person otherwise. If, for example, I’m trying to track down a short story I remember reading 30 years ago in an old copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that was printed 20 years before that, I can ask the Dope and get an answer within hours, and with a little Googling find the complete text.
Trying to accomplish that same task in 1990 would have probably been impossible.
(On a side note, there’s something deeply ironic about using an online message board to argue that life would be better without the internet.)