Inspired by the thread https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-the-internet-went-down-permanently-would-it-be-a-net-gain-or-a-net-loss/987580 about the world if Internet would close down. Since we depend on Internet for so many things, the consequence of closing it would be massive. But what if it would never have been invented? Obviously the world could function just fine without it (as many of us can attest from personal experience pre 1990). Would there be major differences, besides the obvious ones (Internet-based business/activities)? Would world history be different?
I think we could still have mobile phones as these worked fine without Internet, but maybe we’d have been stuck with Blackberries, which IIRC had some kind of private ‘net’ function for sending messages.
Otherwise I can’t think of how the world would have developed; my imagination remains stuck in how the world was in 1990, while obviously other technologies and societal developments would still have occurred.
Which internet are we talking about? The one that became available to the general public around 1995, or the system used by computers to talk to each other remotely from the time such communication was invented (the 1950s?) through 1995?
You may need to define what you mean by the “internet” because what you describe here with Blackberries is an INTERconnected NETwork of devices.
Do you mean the web? Or networks involving more than some arbitrary number of devices? Or the major internet backbone (the one that’s basically existed for decades before the 90s)?
When the Internet started, and for me that was when email became available, I couldn’t imagine what it turn into. The earliest browsers were crude and not very intuitive to use. My biggest concern was whether the USPS would survive with the advent of email, which of course it did.
I had a Blackberry, and thought is was clunky to use with my fat fingers, although it was better than carrying a pager which I did for many years before.
As you suggest, it would have stayed very much like it was in the early 90s, and as I recall, I had a perfectly good amount of technology at the time. I didn’t need the Internet because we had other ways of communicating and getting information. It was just much less efficient back in those days.
Good point, sloppy definition. Technically speaking I probably should have said the World Wide Web, meaning the system that Tim Berners-Lee proposed, which IIRC consists of HTML and possible other protocols, and the idea of a browser. Admittedly this was build on other protocols (TCP/IP?) that were in use already to connect computers. IIRC it was the combination of HTML and public access to the Internet (in the technical sense) and e-mail which spawned the revolution. This at least is what non-technical people probably mean by ‘The Internet’.
So it would have sufficed if HTML had not been proposed and/or the Internet had remained closed as a DoD/academic network.
So, pre-Blackberry I still got my news from newspapers, magazines, and the nightly news. I would print out driving directions. And I had no idea what people were having for dinner or what it looked like because Facebook was not yet a thing.
Basically, going back to 2004, which would be fine by me. The economy would be differnent as you would not have people making obsence money by creating apps. Banking would be slower as well.
One perspective, related to the legal profession. The ability to do legal research online, do depositions remotely, and transfer and file pleadings electronically have significantly changed the logistics involved in practicing law. I can file something in a court in another state at 4:55 p.m., while in the “old days” I had to get it done at least 24 hours early and fedex the documents to the court clerk.
I once was in the back of a courtroom while a colleague was getting ready to cross examine an expert witness. The expert said something unexpected in direct exam, and we started researching it on our laptops. By the next break we had a peer reviewed journal article he co-authored that directly contradicted his testimony. Printed it out in court, and rammed it down his throat. The internet made that possible.
I can easily imagine being a lawyer without the internet (I was one). It worked. It was very different though.
IMO, the US economy would have collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic without the mass ability for remote work provided by the modern Internet.
Trump might not have been elected without social media, so the pandemic might have been handled better. A lack of Internet has not prevented incompetent POTUSes in the past.
The boom of the 1990s was driven by the tech sector. The US federal government surpluses of the Clinton years were also driven by adoption of web technology. Those would not have happened.
I spent a big chunk of my career pre-Internet and pre web (which is something that runs on the internet.) The big issue is that there was no fully accepted standard for computers communicating with each other, so you had islands of connectivity.
Remember AOL? It began as a GUI on its own set of computers which you dialed into. It was certainly easy enough for non-techies to use.
Before the web I could send email all over the world, but you had to know a path from your machine to the machine of the recipient. Business cards had the path from the main machines which were known to all - mine had {ihnp4,decvax,ucbvax}!erc3ba!sd. Anyone could send email to me with that info.
I suspect that instead of the internet we see today there would be a bunch of companies with groups of servers letting people call in - probably using the same communications tech we have today. We might have a lot of the same apps. Back in 1975 I was on PLATO, where we had message boards, instant messaging, email, multiplayer interactive gaming and primitive graphics. It all ran on one computer connected to local terminals like I used but via satellite to remote terminals all over the country. Nothing commercial, of course, but I understand that it did pick up some porn after I left.
I guess that instead of putting whatever stuff they wanted on the web like today, people in the non-internet world would have to go through the equivalent of app stores.
I never used AOL but did have experience with both CompuServe (CLI) and Prodigy (GUI) dial-up services. They were fine for interfacing with other users on those systems but most of the nascent ‘hacker’ community was on independent bulletin board systems (BBS) which you basically learned about from notices at local computer stores and from other BBS users.
Agreement on most points but I suspect we’d see consolidation and takover by one or two telecom giants which would then gatekeep access and implement a microsubscription model for specific access and applications in addition to a subscription fee for general access; essentially what has happened to online video streaming platforms today would be universal for all internet services, complete with ads (unless you pay a premium) and tracking all user activity and metadata to feed ‘the algorithm’. So, basically the same ‘enshittification’ that we experience now except earlier and even more ubiquitous. The developing world and many European nations would likely have limited or no access to this service as their postal service or some other government bureaucracy would try to develop and implement a comparable service with typically underwhelming results and limited-to-no global interoperability.
I agree. I would have gone into more of the details but my post was long enough already.
I wonder how much of a pain would these companies make it to communicate with someone in another connectivity island. I do think the European nations would come around when their local systems started bleeding money and the users rebelled. The French system was supposedly good for the time, but didn’t last all that long.
The internet has transformed how we gain knowledge. Before its arrival, most people’s knowledge was limited to their jobs or personal interests, and learning more required effort—through books, professional journals, libraries, or asking experts.
These days, the average Joe knows a lot more than ever before, thanks to the internet’s endless buffet of information. Back in the day, you had to work to learn things outside your specialty. If you were an accountant, for instance, you’d have to make a special trip to the library to learn about something like astrophysics or pick up a professional journal to stay abreast.
Now, with the World Wide Web practically glued to our fingertips, we can learn about anything that catches our fancy in seconds. Curious about quantum mechanics or ancient recipes? It’s all there with a few clicks. This explosion of accessible knowledge has broadened our horizons, letting us dabble in subjects we’d never have encountered otherwise. Whether it’s brushing up on complex theories or just diving into another round of funny cat videos (I have 5 cats, so shoot me) the internet has turned us into well-rounded (or at least well-entertained) individuals.
But it’s not all sunshine and cat memes . The internet has also made it easy to be alone together—“cocooning” with our screens instead of meeting people in the flesh. SDMB anyone? Plus, with algorithms steering us toward content that confirms what we already believe, it’s a recipe for social bubbles. So, while the internet makes us smarter in some ways, it also makes it harder to connect and see eye to eye with each other.
All in all, I think the benefits outweigh the faults, at least for me and hopefully for most people. For others, it’s a vast wasteland of distractions, clickbait, and rabbit holes that lead to hours lost and minds numbed.
I haven’t seen any evidence that this is so. I do see more and more people with completely off-the-wall concepts and ideas, though. Like the cab driver in Paris who debated vigorously for a case of giant races living uncontacted in remote parts of the world, or my past colleague, a bright fellow who wouldn’t stop about his dowsing beliefs.
You paint the pre-internet world in a weird light. For instance, popular science / technology / history etc. magazines were common and commonly available, and they served much the same purpose and had much the same effect as the internet today, or the better parts of it. I had endless fascinating discussions about all kinds of things with my well-read friends, decade(s) before the internet came to be.
Learning about and actually learning something are really far apart. When people I meet learn about my lifelong interests, it’s not rare to hear them say “Oh, I’ve seen videos about that.” But soon it comes apparent they haven’t learned anything about the subject and cannot do anything with the “knowledge” they’ve gained. They might just as well have not watched those videos, if we talk about learning.
Of course you can gain a deep understanding about myriad subjects (but not all subjects, I assure you) by going online and doing the work. 99.999999% of the time that doesn’t happen. All that happens is being entertained.
Does anyone looking at Trump / Harris really feel we have been “turned into well-rounded individuals”?
This is nonsense. You can’t understand anything about quantum mechanics (insofar as anyone understand it, which is to say, understands the mathematical model of quantum field theory without worrying about the underlying premise) “with a few clicks.” What the Internet has provided is a belief in many people that the ‘understand’ complex topics by reading a Wikipedia entry or a few random blogs and then can expound on that topic with extensive citations which only tangentially relate to the question at hand. The “endless buffet of information” is largely garbage and without curation is becoming even moreso, while people put ever less effort into actually studing and understanding complex issues that require more than an eight minute YouTube video to explain.
The Internet is great for how it gives ready access to data that would be nearly impossible for a member of the public to access in the pre-online era, but it is pretty terrible for giving context to that data or the underlying knowledge to correctly interpret it. Instead, we got Facebook and then Twitter, social media sites that many journalists became highly dependent upon despite that reality that there was no vetting of informational content and it mostly served as a promotional mechanism for falsehoods.
I suspect we’d have services like Minitel. In Europe they’d be government monopolies; in North America probably a de facto private monopoly or duopoly. Minitel - Wikipedia
The internet is as good, or bad as you want it to be. Good content is there for the taking (and more than just a few short videos on any particular subject), as well as lousy content. Will you gain a Ph.D. level education from WWW content? No, that’s what universities are for. But can you gain a solid lay understanding of any particular subject? Yes, I have on a number of varied subjects that piqued my interest. If I want a bit more flesh on a subject, I go to a streaming service, like my subscription to The Great Courses Plus, given by well-credentialed educators by top universities. Again, not for a degree-level education, just a solid understanding of subjects I enjoy. I already put in 10+ years learning medicine at university, now that I’m retired, I just want a good understanding of subjects I like, that I didn’t take in college.
Judging by the level of idiocy I witness in today’s society, perhaps I was overambitious in believing most people use the WWW to educate themselves properly. But maybe a good number of young folks learn enough online to motivate them to pursue higher formal education in subjects they wouldn’t have encountered pre-internet.
There you go. You learned to think critically. Lots of people I see on line haven’t. They pick the first search result they find, look no further, and never check to see if it makes sense - especially if it agrees with their bias.
I found when researching our book plenty of places where the sources contradicted each other or didn’t make any sense. And these were noncontroversial subjects.
We need students to learn critical research skills - though I worry that in many places examples of bad sites will be exactly what members of the school board love.
Yeah, and even beyond that, learning from internet sources—even well designed ‘self-teaching’ ones like Brilliant or Coursera—does not develop the same depth of knowledge or offer broad perspectives that you will get from working through a text and problem sets, or attending a good lecture-based course with class discussion because there isn’t the same pressure to absorb difficult concepts. It is just too easy to breeze through difficult concepts or ideas that do not accord with your beliefs. And frankly, most people go online to ‘learn’ things that reinforce their existing worldview and belief system, not to be challenged. The “learn[ing] critical research skills” is (or at least, should be) the main purpose of post-secondary education; anyone can learn to look up formulas or parrot the ideas of others but it takes real discipline and skill to derive methodology from basic principles or critically deconstruct and examine an argument to find logical and rhetorical flaws that undercut the conclusion, and then be able to restructure or restate the argument to come to a valid conclusion.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t good information on the internet, or that you can’t learn certain skills from internet-based courses. The internet is a great marketplace of ideas, and a source of otherwise difficult-to-access data, but it is not self-vetting and is mostly full of complete garbage that you have to sift through like a raccoon to find the morsels of truth. This was true from the beginning; even Usenet and the original LISTSERVs on BITNET were full of conspiranoia, urban legends, and bad information, which should have served to a counterpoint to all of the techno-utopianism about how “information wants to be free” and “good ideas rise to the top”. The reality is that just as in the ocean plastic and refuse float to the top, and you have to dive in deep to see the grand scheme of life below.
Most people, of course, use the internet and the social media that dominates most usage as a source of gossip, titillation, and the dopamine hit of recreational outrage, much to the detriment of public discourse and agreement upon basic facts about the world. As an early user and adopter of various internet-enabled technologies and capabilities, I have to opine that the potential of such a global communication system has been mostly wasted.
The problem with this question is that if we didn’t have the Internet, we would make the Internet.
There are so many technologies that are close to the Internet, so it’s the next logical leap. You would need to define some kind of boundary, and maybe a plausible reason it can’t be crossed.
Oh, I couldn’t agree more about how vital critical thinking is when navigating the internet as a learning tool. In many cases, a little bit of unchecked information is worse than knowing nothing at all. With such a huge amount of content out there, it’s a double-edged sword; we’re lucky to have it, but it also means we need to be careful about verifying sources and fact-checking as we go.
Ultimately, the internet is an incredible resource, but its true worth shines when people approach it with a critical mindset and a commitment to digging deeper. For those with solid critical thinking skills—like, say, many Dopers—the web is a goldmine. For others who might not be as discerning… well, best just to avoid them.
. The internet has also made it easy to be alone together—“cocooning” with our screens instead of meeting people in the flesh. SDMB anyone? Plus, with algorithms steering us toward content that confirms what we already believe, it’s a recipe for social bubbles. So, while the internet makes us smarter in some ways, it also makes it harder to connect and see eye to eye with each other.