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Millennial, briefly experienced a life with limited access to information.
You are capable of more than you think. You wrote phone numbers down and memorized your own. You memorized the ones you used regularly. I had 7-8 friends and family numbers memorized.
You also only needed one phone number per household.
When you needed to know something like how to fix a car or replace a light bulb you asked someone. Often An uncle, aunt, or cousin. If nobody in your friends/family group knew, you went to the library.
Yellow pages and magazines and instruction manuals were constantly floating around with information. I never felt deprived of curiosity. I read a lot.
It’s almost getting harder to find accurate information now with information overload, especially when a ton of it is just AI or SEI marketing sites.
I feel that. I actually was just lamenting that a minute ago, looking at the bottom of my Zippo lighter, which says “1941 Replica.”
“Man, imagine living in a time when nobody thought smoking was bad for you…” - my brain
Imagine living in 1902, when you could just go to the store and buy cocaine and heroin for your toothache.
Hell, listening to the fun our parents had growing up. It shouldn’t be punishable by years in prison to shoot off some fireworks at a party. (I live in OH, our fireworks laws are brutal. Us and Utah, man.)
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with lamenting that the past is gone. Yes, there were bad things we’re better off without, but we lost and gave up a lot, too. Missing those things isn’t wrong.
As a gen X, 47, part of the latch key generation. You just did things yourself and became resilient yourself. Parents always had a set of phone numbers to call if needed. You had access to a phone book but mostly you just called your friends and got a group together to do something with. Go fishing, Ride bikes, hangout, pickup baseball sandlot style, basketball, swimming, or Nintendo when it was hot out during the summer.
And we all taught each other stuff, some of us knew how to change a bike tire, some of us knew how to tie fishing knots and what baits to use. And we all had our way of getting some stuff for free or discounted stuff from a parents business, restraunt or arcade.
We all knew who’s dads had porno mags and where they were hidden. And on occasion we could sneak some cigarettes or beer.
There would be days during the summer I’d be out of the house before my parents and they wouldn’t see me well past sunset. Shit was just easier and the world less scary I guess.
As far as driving in cities we didn’t live in, I have no idea how my parents found shit. Lincoln, grand island I can find things easily without Gps. And any rural town with 300 miles of them. Omaha I can’t find shit without Gps
I struggle with my daughter because her mother is afraid of everything and that’s been passed to her. Some things I get, and I’m glad she has a phone with her, I’d like her to take more initiative in finding things to do herself and I push her and my wife to let her be more independent
Hypernormalization.
When you’re living in it, you don’t know what the future will have. I like my information and tech, but growing up as a kid before all that was pretty sweet. You weren’t always after knowing or researching or finding out everything. You lived more in the moment.
There was also a freedom that will never return for anyone. Imagine going places and doing things that at best will only be a story people could tell. No pictures or videos that keep or prove anything forever digitally around. It’s something you subconsciously think about now all the time. It didn’t used to exist. Also the freedom of being a kid and wanting to go hang out wondering around with friends all day completely untethered or tracked. Just a “be home before the streetlights come on” and beyond that your parents have no idea where you are and can’t call you. Getting lost was an adventure.
I mean, imo, you got it correct with many of your descriptions:
Fear, Anxiety, Panic, caused by the lack of access to the internet.
Now, I thought I was going to have to coin a term here, but something pretty close already exists:
Nomophobia, fear of not having your your smartphone.
Other proposed terms from other people over the years:
discomgoogolation
abinterretephobia
macriapodiadictuophobia
These have all been proposed as words to mean, basically, fear of not having access to the internet.
Now, you are describing more specifically a fear of an entire, past world without widespread internet access, which is a bit different… as it isn’t just you personally not having your internet device, but the total lack of them, the lack of societal norms built around them, etc.
I would point out that there are still roughly 3 billion of people on Earth, right now, who live without consistent and reliable access to the internet, who cannot afford a smart phone or any kind of internet device.
But yeah, as others have said… before the internet was widespread… we used libraries, we read books and articles and physical newspapers… sometimes, you would have to hunt down a particular rare book, or ask a library to get it loaned from another library, you could wait weeks or months.
I remember an actual physical voicemail machine, an actual physical caller ID device, I remember having to commit my friend’s and family’s 10 digit phone numbers to memory, or carry a small personal contact list with me.
I remember when getting a cordless phone, that would let you go sit down on the couch instead of having to stand or sit within 3 feet of the wall mounted phone… was a completely mind blowing innovation.
And I was born in the tail end of the 80s, before the Berlin Wall fell.
I remember being forced into typing lessons, on an actual keyboard, as one of the very few things my dad forced me into that was actually a good call, and now that the vast majority of younger folks use touchscreens… an increasing number of them have no idea how to actually type, which blows my mind because for the vast majority of my life, not knowing how to type was an extremely stereotypical Boomer attribute.
And now its getting far worse, with an absolute epidemic of students of all manner of subjects who just do not know anything, because they are reliant on some kind of AI to answer all their questions and generate all their answers.
It has been argued before that a human with a smartphone, which they have at all times, is functionally a kind of ‘soft’ cyborg, as the smartphone is a part of so much of their thinking, their culture, their way of life.
So, I suppose its understandable that a ‘soft’ cyborg is terrified by the idea of having part of their brain ripped out, and cannot comprehend how a society could function with everyone not having their portable thinking and communication augmentation.
Nomophobia
There is a religious figure in the sacred texts of the AllatRa cult, called Nomo. In this context, nomophopbia would be a good thing. Especially once you find out whom in the real world he’s supposed to represent.
I look at TV shows like OP is talking about and think it might be kind of nice to live in an era where things are slower. If a library book might take weeks and you need to go into town to get a comic book, or there’s nothing to do until dinner except maybe some activity with the people in your close vicinity, it feels like a much more intimate way to experience the world. But I do remember in my early teens when the first wave of Personal Data Assistants came out, and I was wowed by the technology. I can edit a computer document right here in the palm of my hand. Keep my contacts with me, a calendar, a calculator, simple drawing programs. It felt like that device could do everything, years before smartphone was a word. Now I carry two phones around on two different carriers because I too fear a world without service. I sometimes want to go back to the slower world, so I do at times relish long waits at the DMV with nothing to do, or a power outage on a stormy night. But I hate feeling like I’m wasting my time. Even when there’s nothing to do, I’m always trying to do something, it’s just that being constrained forces me to pick different things. So, I’m not sure if it would help or hurt OP to hear that if they grew up before any of this existed, there’s every possibility they would have felt more fulfilled. Because time was something you could still get a handle on and not feel like it’s always slipping away. At least, not so much. In that sense, ignorance can really be bliss.
I disagree that ignorance can be bliss in this case.
Look up the Carrington Event.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing that would prevent that from happening again at literally any time.
And if the Carrington Event happened now, it would most likely knock out the vast majority of the world’s power systems and telecommunication systems… possibly for a very long time, depending on how much chaos ensued.
Even without a one in a million even like that… the world is literally on fire. Climate change is out of control, and it is consistently worse that consensus projections from 5 or 10 years ago.
Disasters will intensify, infrastructure will be knocked out, the food supply system will buckle, governments will become more authoritarian, and be more likely to go to war with each other.
It will be a very rude wakeup call for the totally smart device dependent people when their region goes offline… they will have as much of a mental breakdown from not having access to tech and the web as they will from ‘how will i eat, where will i live?’
I guess there’s two kinds of ignorance at play here.
The kind I was referring to is the ignorance of high standards. If you don’t know that you can live in a state of constant dopamine drip supplied by your cellular device, because cellular devices haven’t been invented yet, you wouldn’t miss those dopamine hits that you don’t even know will exist. I think OP would have been just fine if they were born into an earlier generation. Because they would have the bliss of not knowing what future they’re missing out on.
But to your point, the constantly supplied bliss from our internet bubbles does make us more ignorant to the things outside our bubble. And these days, the things we focus on are often dictated by the corporations who make the addictive apps. So, those corporations will profit by directing away from knowledge about how those same corporations are destroying so many parts of our world. In this case, I would argue that the ignorance is still bliss. It’s just a malignant harmful bliss that distracts from the real things we should be concerned about. And in a way, if it could snap us out the destructive path we’re on, I could see how another Carrington event might actually act as a wake-up call regarding our blatant hubris in thinking that society is ever safe from collapse.
As you mentioned, there are those who live in parts of the world where they have no access to technology, still living in that blissful ignorance of pre-computerized times. But that is a social bliss. They will still be hurt by the geological effects that the industrial age has wrought. And it won’t be pretty.
So, I think I would agree with your assertion, plus an addendum. Ignorance isn’t bliss. But it was.
Well said, eloquently said!
I grew up in New Zealand in the 50s-60s. We got most info on current events from the radio. Later on there was TV, but it was mainly radio. Our radio had long-wave and if atmospheric conditions were right you could pick up foreign broadcasts.
Other knowledge came from school, obviously, and from libraries. I absolutely haunted my local library, and read voraciously. I still have a fund of info in my head from back then that comes in handy in pub quizzes. When I wasn’t reading I was out with my friends on our bicycles. We rode for miles at a time - I don’t remember ever telling an adult where we were going.
(About libraries - I don’t know if you’re aware, but the tycoon Andrew Carnegie funded libraries around the world, including the one in the city near my home town.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_library
Having said all that and making it sound idyllic, it wasn’t. Society back then was repressive in major ways and people’s viewpoints were generally narrow. History books weren’t always telling the truth. It wasn’t terrible compared with say apartheid South Africa, but not great. There was a counter-culture bubbling away - beatniks and then hippies - so it was possible to get an alternative view, just about.
I love the technology that gives me access to not just information, but the lived experience of people round the world. I love reading posts here about mad trivial stuff like what you all are having for breakfast. I love taking a Street View tour of places I’ll likely never visit. I’m reading a novel set in Iceland at the moment, and can “drive” along the route a character is taking. I can video chat with my sister, who lives 10,000 miles away. It’s a miracle!
It’s because back then there was a thing called boredom which led to creativity and generally happier lives. Now, it’s nearly impossible to be bored, and people are much less apt to learn a new thing or go on an adventure because theyre obsessed with their phones. Institute a no phone or no internet rule on weekends, I do this and it’s great!
I think you are deeply mistaken in believing that people can be on their phones and not be bored at the same time.
But it’s a satisfying boredom, weirdly enough
Nope. Me doomscrolling for hours is very much not satisfying at all. It’s just boredom (combined with existential dread and overstimulation).
That’s what I mean. It’s boring but you can do it for hours. Most other boring things people will just quit and do something else.
Exactly. If you’re sitting there with no phone, you’re more apt to pick up a book or go somewhere than just doomscroll
As a BBS era kid, I know you’re not trying to simulate the whole thing right now in the comments section. I’d say: you would have done fine, in any era. People talk, they share methods, and you would’ve picked up whatever you needed.
I think it’s just a common sort of nightmare, worrying about being unprepared, dealing with the consequences of lack of preparation.
I recommend the first few minutes of Jason Scott’s The BBS Documentary, for an overview of how people communicated in the pre-internet days. Especially if you imagine yourself a telegraph operator chatting with neighboring stations in the 19th century or something.
I’m around five to ten years older than you and get the same feeling sometimes. Not so much from TV shows or movies, but also from reading or watching real-life stories from that time. Like, when reading documents written pre-Internet that reference then-current events, how and how much did they know about those events? All just TV and newspapers? Nowadays I can easily find out what happened back then, but that was obviously not so much so at the time.
I do not remember a time without the Internet at all, but I do remember very well a time before mobile Internet, and I remember that around the time you were born, most people watched TV almost every day. I hardly ever watch TV nowadays, there is so much more entertainment online (e.g. YouTube).
As for looking up information, in the mid-to-late 2000s it was really mostly Wikipedia that built up the Internet as a useful resource for doing that. Obviously nowadays nearly all information that can be found there can be found on numerous other websites too; the Internet has now been built up, so Wikipedia is arguably a much less important website now than back then…
The whole “le wrong generation” thing is kind of a fallacy because being alive now allows you to enjoy all the pop culture that has gone before and today’s pop culture too. We’re in a win-win situation being alive now.
Those of us in our 40-50s that helped build the thing you are having trouble imagining life without are more and more wishing they didn’t do it. We know the world before and after and yearn for the world we helped destroy. The WWW had so much potential, but like all good things it was shit on by corpo scum.
Yep, my opinion is pretty much dead set that things really were better back then.
Yeah . We might be the first generation that’s objectively correct when we say things used to be better.
look at history book “Oh no”
flips though more pages 😳
(Wars, Oppression, Poverty, Polio…)
We certainly still have the first three and Captain Brainworm is working hard to bring back all sorts of terrible diseases.
idk why you have that feeling, but maybe it helps to remember all this info was available too, but it took longer to get it. for example, you got the news only via radio, tv and newspaper and had to keep track of time to watch it or go buy a newspaper with news from yesterday. you could get media from the library or shops, like record stores etc… you could buy maps in certain places and there were usually public maps in towns. to message someone you had multiple options, for example telegraph them. many homes had compact encyclopedia describing most known things in short. if your home didn’t have this, you could ask neighbours or check with schools or libraries.
maybe that feeling is projected impatience. maybe it’s frustration with how slow and complicated things were.
I think I just remembered one of my fears that I always have: The idea of censorship
With the internet, I can find foreign journalist’s publications to cross-check facts.
Before the internet, I don’t think foreign press critical of your country’s government, especially if it’s an authoritarian country, would’ve been permitted.
Sure there are website censorships too in the modern era. But I think getting a VPN is far easier than smuggling foreign books and newspapers, and word-of-mouth news is just a long telephone game.
It was much the opposite! Yeah, we only had 3 or 4 news sources on TV, but they mostly said the same things. Being caught bullshitting, or having even a little bias, was unthinkable as trust was the only selling point as to what station you watched.
As to criticizing the government, catching politicians bullshitting was the national sport for journalists.
Bloom County was a great comic that covered American culture and politics from 1980-1989. You won’t get many of the references, but it’s a perfect snapshot of the 80s.
back then you were also able to obtain foreign news via radio or some foreign newspapers. on airports and big train stations you could usually get foreign newspapers and magazines. also, it was expected of reporters to be as objective as possible most of the time. the shit fox and others pull nowadays was absolutely faux pas until like the 70s and was less bad until like mid 90s.
Before the internet, I don’t think foreign press critical of your country’s government, especially if it’s an authoritarian country, would’ve been permitted.
You’d find this on Shortwave radio. Without going into the science of it, with a Shortwave radio, you could hear news reports from the other side of the planet. I could easily regularly turn in the BBC when I was on the other side of the Atlantic.
But I think getting a VPN is far easier than smuggling foreign books and newspapers, and word-of-mouth news is just a long telephone game.
The danger on this front is today’s surveillance society. If you had managed to smuggle in books or newspapers into your home, the only way they would have been found is if law enforcement would have entered your home and searched it enough. Realistically that would be a lot of effort to try to do that on a society. Its possible, certainly, but very difficult. Today, even with your VPN, a zero-day exploit or DNS hijack could let them watch in real-time everything you’re doing without even tipping you off.
You would naturally have more friends because you’re not on the internet all the time. You would probably have a third place. Go to parks and what not. I’m an introvert as well and I grew up in the 90s, you’d be fine. Lol life finds a way. You would be surprised what you would be willing to do when there is nothing else.
90s kid introvert here.
I would hop on my bike of a Saturday morning, explore the town for an hour, hit the library, come home a few hours later with as many books as I could fit in my backpack.
I’d stay up late learning to code from paperback manuals, save my games to floppies and swap them with friends at school or make my brothers play them.
I ran a year-long pen-and-paper fantasy wargame with my friends from the Scouts, I’d spend an hour every week tabulating the results of everyone’s orders and updating the map.
90s kid here, but in a poor and rural area. I would play in my yard all day and couldn’t leave because it bordered a highway, and the nearest business was 5 miles away. Libraries were special trips. I had no neighbors, and no friends aside from school and church.
I played a fuckload of super Mario and read everything in the house whether I enjoyed it or not. Got halfway through the encyclopedia before we got free dial up Internet through AOL trial CDs and NetZero, but even then time was limited because phone line time was expensive.
I’m you from the previous generation. I lived too far away from the library to reach it on bike, but parents worked near it so they’d bring me books on their way home and returned by read ones at the same time. For me those games were written in BASIC for Commodore 64 along with rampant game piracy. Our made up pen-and-paper games were also made up but were mostly based on Cold War and Middle East scenarios.
yisss I was also jamming on the C64, a hand-me-down from a cousin
Eventually I had read all the books I was interested in at the local library, and the second nearest library, and the downtown library, and I was riding eight miles each way to get to the far side of town. As long as I was back by dinnertime!
Welp I had a brief time in elementary school to middle school like right before the smartphone era really began (think like 2012-2016), there was nearly zero phones in school at that time, I can assure you I still had near zero friends and everyone that I do talk to, I only considered them to be an “acquaintance”. Everyone talked to each other, I was the loser making origami stuff and being a loser in the corner by myself with barely anyone to talk to. So yea I kinda hated my life during that time period. Perhaps seeing tv shows portray pre-internet era triggered these subconcious memories and cause those fears to resurge?
Not having anyone to talk to for a few years in grade school doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have managed in a world without the internet. Its perhaps unfortunate that smartphones enabled you to be insular and never develop more socially (in regards to your original question)
You didn’t have much info, but neither did other people! People told the weirdest stories and “facts”.
You know that Marilyn Manson got his bottom ribs removed so he could suck other guys’ dicks?
No no no, to duck his own dick! I read it, I mesn a friend said he read it, definitely.
(But I like yours better)
Thank you. I stole the joke from Scoot (RIP Big Cat)
As a kid my mom kept a list of questions and we looked them up in the encyclopedias at the library every weekend, and a lot of people with more money had encyclopedia sets at home. So people could get information but it took a little effort and wasn’t instant
We read Ripley’s Believe It or Not and the Guinness Book of World Records instead of Wikipedia. Urban legends were rampant. Everyone lived in constant fear of “the gum disease gingivitis”.
We also had encyclopedias, which were mostly accurate at one point in time but always a decade of more out of date when used as a reference.
People had encyclopedias and dictionaries in their homes. They read newspapers every day [and since there was a lot of coemption between papers they made sure of their facts.]
imho people today are more likely to fall for nonsense because they look for confirmation instead of accuracy.
Newspapers were full of crap then too, and remember those magazines with the craziest stuff, like the man who could smoke through his navel? People believed the weirdest things, like walking with a twig would help you find water pipes, because you’d “feel” them through the twig.
People believed the weirdest things, like walking with a twig would help you find water pipes
Not only they still do, it’s thought in schools and practiced by the water utility professionals in the field.
They’ve charged me a hundred bucks for their expertise, to which I’ve composed an angry email, asking whether the ministry of magic would be willing to cover the damage if we, somehow, despite their findings, manage to find the pipe where it’s not supposed to be, with the front part of the excavator. They advised us to dig carefully, not addressing the magic ritual part at all.
