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Life before cellphones and internet.
Did you know in 1990 only .25% of the world’s population (12.5 million) had cellphones and only .05% (2.8 million) had internet?
It feels like we sacrificed local community and connection for global information overload and disconnection sometimes.
GenX, here. You are so very, very wrong. Phones and internet have made anxiety disorders endemic. We’re constantly bombarded with information, alerts, opinions, information and misinformation…
Young people have never experienced what it’s like to have privacy. To leave the house and be totally unreachable. To get answering machine messages that you had no obligation to immediately respond to.
I’m in big tech and helped develop all this shit. We made it addictive on purpose. I’d love to go back to how things were in the 90s, and I’m not waxing nostalgic. Things were objectively better before all this crap.
I'm a millennial who's old enough to remember those days. It's an absolutely huge difference, though at least if you're expecting a phone call, you don't have to scuttle your whole day sitting by the landline.
Maybe I am, but I don’t think so. I’m a Xennial and also workin tech. You and I feel the same but I don’t think we’re in the majority. It might not be 90% but I think we are the ever shrinking minority that feels this way.
Heh. I read the title of this post backwards. You and I are saying the same thing!
Been talking about this a lot lately. Older millennial here. I loved that brief little slice of time I got to experience, when DSL / cable was around and no longer "pay by the minute" and someone answering a phone wouldn't kick you off.
Web pages loaded fast enough. They were fine. Downloads? Just be patient. No problem. WoW and friends, Unreal Tournament, Battlefield 2142, all ran just fine.
But mostly...
I miss when the Internet was a place you went all its own, it wasn't everywhere, it wasn't inside of literally everything. You had to "visit" it. Logging on meant you could also log off. It didn't follow your every move.
Handheld game consoles were still airgapped, the main ones had it optional.
People had blogs for fun, they used the web to express themselves and share ideas and stupid subcultures and memes. It didn't "matter."
It wasn't "the commercial internet." It was just The Web. It was somewhere else.
Everything wasn't built on inescapable addiction algorithms that follow you everywhere, and have already your shadow identity shared to innumerable servers because someone knows someone who used one of those services and you were in a group picture once.
For the younger kids, there was a time when your entire life from birth wasn't shared without your consent for the world to see. (How many people really understood privacy settings anyway?)
Disconnecting now feels more impossible than ever, it takes a huge effort not unlike fasting, and mental overload is the norm.
So much of it is just corporatized, weaponized, and predatory.
meh. yeah it's been bad for mental health but... what did you read while shitting, the back of the shampoo bottle?
Sometimes yeah, or your bathroom had a magazine rack
I don't think you understand what anxiety is if you think being totally unreachable as a solution to modern anxiety...
I'm gonna venture he means being totally unreachable...
... by your boss on your day off.
Nah. "Young people have never experienced what it's like to have privacy. To leave the house and be totally unreachable..."
That is explicitly what OP said. To be totally unreachable in the literal sense can easily be a source of anxiety on its own.
Ah I see, yeah you're right!
That is something that occurs to me too. It's weird to me now, imagining couples separating to go to work or whatever, and you just gotta believe everything is gonna be fine, and if there were an emergency, someone has to be near the right landline.
Although I grew up with earlier cellphones and pagers, I got my first cell way later than a lot of highschool kids.
But yes, definitely, If me and my wife couldn't reach each other during the day, that'd be a ton of anxiety! The world's too insane these days to not have rapid communication on hand.
I only wish technology evolved as a tool for the user and the people, rather than primarily as content consumption and surveillance devices.
Then it would be more normal to have a setup like we do: We chat on Signal and can send our location voluntarily and it stays between us, without a dozen third parties quietly listening in, analyzing, and selling that information.
I do however, think there would also be a certain serene peace in being unreachable by undesirable contacts but not by loved ones.
For example, it's dystopian how non-emergency jobs evolved to expect that they can just zip a message to you whenever they feel like, and you're almost coerced to receive it and respond, and setting boundaries against that can be risky. It brings an unwanted cop or nanny into our personal lives.
Oh we killed local community before that
Suburbs and freeways, man. :(