I’ve been reading a lot of older books (like mid 20th c. or earlier) with a lot of them written by UK authors. I love that when I come across a term I know nothing about, I can easily look it up. I’m old enough to remember having to call up the library to have a reference librarian look something up. Couldn’t do that in the middle of the night.
But the worst thing I hate is a rather small thing – I hate to text. Everyone wants you to text, but I’ve always found it physically awkward. I wasn’t able to use my thumbs for sh*t, and using a finger caused so many typos I just wanted to give up. Then, when reading a Lawrence Block story, I came across the term Killer Thumb (aka Murderer Thumb). I couldn’t tell from the description what that was exactly, so when I looked it up (on the internet, natch) I was a bit nonplused. I have a Killer Thumb (well, thumbs)! So, I have a bit of a deformity that prevents me from easily texting.
But I think if you took these folks’ internet away they’d cry like babies.
I’m an older Millennial and no way would I ever want to go back to the pre-Internet era. The Internet was/is one of the greatest things I’ve ever enjoyed in life.
When growing up without the Internet, I didn’t even find out that my favorite team won the Super Bowl until several years later.
I sort of hate it as well. But it’s useful. Mostly between my wife and myself “I’m going to the store, do you need anything type stuff”
What is also very nice is that when I have to be away to take care of ailing family members, my Wife and I can still play chess online. It’s a connection we have. And makes for great banter. Beats the hell out of watching some TV show or movie.
I’m old enough to remember life before the Internet yet grew up with computers and the first available modems. There have been some remarkable gains in efficiency and general availability of things like education, entertainment, material goods and research. This has seemingly come with costs, both known and unknown, that might (or might not) include civility, mental health and addiction, loss of privacy, publicity of less mainstream views, poorer physical health and populist presidencies. It is what it is. Since one cannot return to a future lacking the Internet this is a useless exercise in wishful thought. Many things in life are a mixed bag and this is no exception even if the poll is accurate, which might be reasonably questioned since subtle changes in wording often yield very different results sometimes depending on what the sponsor might want to hear.
I don’t know that I’d say I think we should unplug, or that I pine for pre-Internet times, because I don’t. But I will admit that I do miss the internet before it became so relentlessly commercial and… shitty. Like the way that nearly every commercial search function (Google, Amazon, etc…) are all engineered to point you at specific products/ads/paid sites, not actually you know, give you accurate results for your search. Or the way that so many things are going subscription-model, or free-with-ads that’s so onerous that you basically can’t use it.
Another thing I do miss is the more intelligent nature pre-smartphones. Used to be, that you had to have a PC and know how to do a few things to use the internet. There were still some dumbasses, but they were fewer and further between. Once smartphones came into the picture, every barely literate cretin out there had a direct line into the internet, and everything kind of went to shit. I mean who the hell wants to watch a 3 minute video reviewing something that could have been done in a 100 word paragraph? Or all the clickbait that’s everywhere? Or all the celebrity nonsense that’s everywhere?
I agree with the commercialization of the internet but I think 75% of the overall modern problem would be relieved if everyone just had to go back to shitty c.2006 flip phones instead of being able to (or feeling obligated to) interact online via social media apps and have every moment recorded on high quality video. Yeah, it means you can’t Wiki shit while sitting at Applebees but them’s the breaks.
I’m a Gen Xer, and while I don’t want to go back to pre-internet days, there are some pretty serious social problems that have been exacerbated by social media. We’re still trying to figure it all out. Despite the conveniences, I’m glad the internet wasn’t woven into the fabric of my life growing up.
It is. I don’t know if it comes close to outweighing all the bullying, embarrassment and revenge porn but it’s academic since the cameras aren’t going anywhere.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” - Socrates
Millennial born 1990. I love the internet. I could do without the smartphone, and the attendant always-on always-plugged-in social media culture that came with it. Like most things, the dose is the poison.
I remember that on Usenet every September brought an inrush of idiots, but that was thought to be from kids going to college and getting internet access, and had nothing to do with AOL Not that AOL didn’t let the riff raff in, but it didn’t peak in September.
Saw an item today about millennials learning to budget money by using cash. They just discovered that you can’t spend more cash than you have. I also just heard that I’m really old because I grew up in the 1900s. I’m ready to be made into Soylent Green now.
ISTM the joke was that establishing the AOL/Usenet link caused a state of “permanent September” because now you’d have large numbers of rank “n00bs” showing up year-round, rather that upon each new class entering college.
Ironically, I’d have significantly less to do with internet-less time without the internet. A good majority of books in my to-read stack, for example, are relatively obscure works from non-major publishers, so they might not have been accessible to me (possibly from not ever being published in English at all) without Amazon and the internet,