This thread about comic strips got me to thinking about aspects of life which the internet has made obsolete that I kind of miss. I was never a huge fan of printed newspapers, although I do miss them, but I really did enjoy the comics page, which is evidently disappearing. I just enjoyed the feeling of anticipation I would get when I would get the paper every morning and hastily thumb through to the comics page. I would read it over breakfast.
I also kind of miss paper catalogs, and in general the old ritual of “ordering” something. Now we just click a few links and fill out a few fields and it’s send to us, and many of us do this multiple times a week. But for many people, ordering used to be reserved for special purposes, involved locating SKUs and the like, and waiting 4-6 weeks for a package in the mail.
Finally, I miss the social aspect of everyone who watched a tv show watching it at the same time. Now with tivo and teh intrawebs and such, we can all watch most shows whenever we want, but I do remember the family gathering every <blank> day at <blank> time for whatever show and watching together. In a way, it was social bonding, just like eating meals together was.
There is no way I would choose to go back to the old days, but I do feel nostalgia for the days when information was hard to come by. I treasured music fanzines and magazines – they were almost my only source of information about the bands I liked and almost the only way to discover interesting new bands before the internet. I say almost because the other main source was people who had great record collections and knew a lot about music. I used to love racking other peoples brains for information, or being the source and helping other people discover obscure bands they would love. Before the internet, it might be years between hearing about a band and actually hearing their stuff. These days, it’s onto youtube or wherever and a hour later you know everything there is to know. The same went for books and movies. The veil has been lifted from a mysterious world and that is mostly a great thing - obscure bands that didn’t find their natural audience the first time around are getting another shot.
It’s nearly impossible to find a good deal on a guitar or a keyboard or an amp or speakers or anything else these days, because with the internet, everyone knows how much everything costs everywhere else.
I mean, I remember a guy I knew finding a 1967 Mosrite guitar in a pawn shop in Tallahassee, FL back in the early 1990s. He picked it up for like $300. Today, any pawn shop in the world that had that same guitar come in would just dial it up on the internet, see what other people were charging and paying for them, and price it accordingly. It sucks. :mad:
Somehow browsing around at Amazon.com just isn’t the same as browsing around in my favorite (and for the most part now closed-forever) bookstores.
And since I mostly listen to music in my office, and since my office computer allows me to listen to an extraordinarily wide range of music for free anytime I want, I can’t even remember the last time I visited the music store . . . a place I used to really enjoy visiting.
Independent record stores, and big-corporation record stores that focused on music rather than DVDs/electronics. Seems like every few months another music store closes down around here.
And, oh my, CD singles. How I miss them. I wouldn’t give up digital music for anything but I wish they still did CD singles, even if I was the only person to buy them.
I’m with Manwich about learning about new bands and stuff. My brother and I used to pore over this Billboard Top 40 book we had. We also had an encyclopedia of TV shows.
Seems like now I sort of keep all my knowledge on the Internet. If I need to know something I know I can look it up later when it becomes important.
I also miss tape trading. Taping live shows and trading them was a huge part of my life just before the Internet. My brother and I would go to trading conventions, and I had a good collection of my favorite stuff.
Now, everything is so easy to get it’s not even fun anymore. I can’t remember the last time I was excited to hear a recording of a live show. I got a couple of those Pearl Jam shows and was already tired of it.
Although I love access to information and instant access to information every more, including news, research, knowledge learned in messageboard conversations, I do find that my emotions are up and down as I instantly find out about things and take part in back-and-forth conversations – tragedies, political fighting, topical events, recreation outrage issues – as they happen.
I find this causes me to be more agitated, angry, sheltered, and sometimes too much more informed than those around me a lot the time. I do want the instant access the worldwide web gives me but maybe, just maybe, it’s a little too much.
I know, I know, turn off the computer, go outside, smell a flower. But it’s there waiting for me when I came back!
descamisado, along those lines, I kind of think I was, in a way, better informed when I got all my news from Tom Brokaw and the local news guys. I think the available amount of information now is so overwhelming, and what it takes to be considered “informed,” requires so much more that my lazy-ass brain just gives up.
Also, I’d like to add that I’m not advocating for a return to, “the good old days.” Just mostly reminiscing about some of the nice things of a less-perfect world.
Travel seemed much more exotic before the internet.
There was no email, no planet-spanning internet chat with those back home, no on-demand video clips of any given exotic location, no Google Earth where you can zoom in on any given location and view any number of photos of said location, and no travel forums where you can read 500 threads detailing the travel exploits of those who have already been to the places you dream of…
The sense that some place was “distant” was far stronger and you could still pretend that you were an explorer, that you were discovering something for the first time… It is much more difficult to do that now.
I was really, genuinely surprised when Bush II won his second term. Solely because I’d been insulated from the wider world and had only really had contact with people like me - I really didn’t see it coming. I think that’s too easy to do these days, even easier than it was back then.
I miss reference books. Big, fat books filled with facts. I used to be really good at finding the information I needed in them. It was a skill, people.
Agreed. Going overseas (especially to somewhere “Exotic” or “Far Away”) really meant something and was worth some sort of status (and maybe even some free drinks!) amongst your friends. I spent a couple of months in the UK in the late 1990s and that was worth some serious credibility when I got home, not to mention making me the de facto International Expert amongst the group. Even trying to contact home from the UK (and we’re talking the late 1990s here, so not that long ago) involved complicated and expensive long-distance calls (from a fixed-line phone) and it sounded like the person on the other end was on Mars, with a noticeable delay between you speaking and them receiving your words and being able to compose a reply.
It was just sort of expected that if you were going to be gone for any length of time less that you’d be out of contact beyond the odd postcard and maybe one or two brief phone calls to reassure the family that you hadn’t fallen into the Thames and been swept out to sea or anything like that. Totally unlike nowadays, of course, where you can send text and picture messages from your cellphone with no hassle at all whenever you like.
Nowadays my well-travelled colleagues and I get to have “Who’s Been To The Most Exotic Place?” discussions over lunch and people casually mention visiting places like Vanuatu or Singapore or Bali or Hawaii in much the same way they’d mention that they ducked down to Sydney or Melbourne last week to see a relative.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact airfares are so affordable nowadays, but I do sometimes miss the feeling of being a sort of latter day Sir Richard Burton and having people be genuinely interested in your travel stories because it wasn’t likely they’d be going there anytime soon.
There’s only one thing I can really think of: the rarity of hearing certain songs. The elusiveness of hearing a song that didn’t get a lot of play, by an artist you would otherwise not care to hear was special. Now you can go on YouTube or buy it on iTunes and hear the song all you want and it’s not such a treat anymore.
I’m not sure if this is nostaliga or not, but I kind of miss reference books. For quick answers, Wikipedia is okay, but I find too often that this happens to me. That never happened in a library.
I’m also kind of nostalgic for printed maps. I used to collect them, from any place in the world. Of course I know that printed maps are still available, but with Google Maps and GPS, I no longer really see the point.
Same here, on both counts. God, when I was a kid, I could just pore over an encyclopedia for hours. I begged my mom to buy the whole World Book encyclopedia for our house. Nowadays, I couldn’t think of a bigger waste of money.
On the plus side, the Internet did give us comics like the one you just linked to (HUGE xkcd fan here). So it’s not all so bad.
Movie trivia used to be impressive and quite hard to come by - including inside baseball stuff in Hollywood. Not celebrity gossip - more like knowing the director that was previously attached to project. Now two minutes on imdb and wiki do the trick.
Porn used to be something to physically horde. My friends in high school kept Playboys they literally found in ditches. Today, it’s not even worth saving digital files unless you really like something or consider yourself some kind of collector. I can’t imagine being 15 with all the streaming free hardcore sites out there.
