…how would it have covered the TV of the era? What shows would be the most eagerly analyzed episode by episode? What TV related gifs and memes would dominate blogs and boards? Who would be the hot fanshipps?
Doubtful. The internet began in the 80’s, and it took 20 years for it really be mainstream. In the early days, nobody thought of it as a place you could get real information. When I was in college in the 90’s, the accounting program still insisted that spreadsheets be done by hand. Nobody even trusted computers either. There was a BBS presence, but nobody took those seriously either. I had prodigy in the 80’s, and it was the wild west. Nobody knew anything or anyone. Internet relay chat was around, but again it wasn’t considered a “real” source.
I’d say nobody really took the Internet seriously until maybe the mid-90’s with the bubble and billion dollar IPO’s. So assuming that timeline, if it had started in the 60’s, it wouldn’t be mainstream until the 80’s.
I have to agree, the 60’s and 70’s would not be the culture it was without snail mail, news reports in delay, and real skepticsm of the computer age. Even though computers were around since the 50’s, they were considered highly experimental, and not to replace people’s work. The reason for me why millennials and to an extent gen x er’s are more open with putting up personal information on the internet and trusting too much the so called “secure” internet sites is that they never lived in the 60’s.
I think people would have picked apart every night of Roots. Fonzie and Lenny and Squiggy memes would probably be big, as would Welcome Back Kotter stuff. Remember the Up Your Nose With a Rubber Hose song? Yeah, but on teh intarwebs.
And just imagine how Watergate would have been covered!
Star Trek
Since the Internet occurring in the 1970s would have also meant that technologies which were created or modified in the late 1990s and the 2000s would also have to exist as well. That means that many events which were mysteries or whose narratives had to be explained by the media such as:
[ol]
[li]The Jonestown,Guyana Massacre[/li][li]The Pentagon Papers[/li][li]The Vietnam War[/li][li]The Iranian Revolution/Hostage Crisis[/li][li]The Arab Oil Embargo[/li][li]The Church Commission[/li][/ol]
Would now be seen in entirely different lights…
I’m going to assume you mean the internet was as popular as it is now in the 60s/70s, so it would have been developed in the 40s or so . . .
The music scene would dramatically change. Instead of only having whatever your local record shop stocked available, you’d have the whole world. True, today you still see very popular bands, but I don’t think you’d see the Beatlemania and other incredibly huge bands of the 60s, simply because a large portion of would-be fans would find something better suited to their tastes.
Once you reach that conclusion, the whole future of music becomes a weird alternate reality, the results of which it’s impossible to know.
Imagine all the motels advertising Color Internet!
There’d be a lot of Doctor Who obsession.
The big fanships would be married couples sleeping in the same bed and having sex with one another. So naughty! So not on TV!
Something tells me there would be a lot of stories about Miss Kitty and the saloon girls in Gunsmoke.
And the gay fanshippers would go to town on Bonanza.
Petticoat Junction porn! I’d probably participate in that.
In fact there’d be lots of creepy Tumblr sites about Ginger and Mary-Ann, or Elly May Clampett, or Jeannie. Maybe slightly more sophisticated sites dedicated to Mary Tyler Moore and Samantha Stevens and Marlo Thomas.
The internet DID exist in the 70s. We didn’t call it that, of course, but it existed and we had it. I used it in college starting around 1977. Granted, it wasn’t until decades later that it fell into the hands of non-geeks.
I think they were talking about the internet as we know it now, not ARPANET.
Guessing the COINTELPRO stuff would’ve blown up way more than it did.
Lots of Nixon caption memes.
Moon hoaxers get an early start.
There would be hot fanshipps for KISS, Farrah Fawcett, Cheryl Teegs, John Travolta, the BeeGees and Tiny Tim.
Assuming you mean the internet was up and running, as it currently is, back in the 60’s:
The JFK assassination would have filled the SDMB with every crackpot theory on earth and I am sure it would have made interesting reading…
Cafe Society would have about 85% of all threads being the Beatles - with a few on other British groups.
Would have been a whole lot of coverage of Dopers at Woodstock - with some fun photos.
Stonewall Riots would have Gay guys like me ranting about Gay Rights.
Getting out of Vietnam would be a big issues in Debates.
Civil Rights movement in the South would be a hot topic.
Drugs - pot, LSD, mescaline, etc. would be mentioned on a regular basis.
Personally, I wish the Internet had been up and active back then - often I felt isolated by the small town mentality back then and it would have been great to at least find a few like-minded individuals who shared common ideas.