Hopefully, I’ll one day tell my grandchildren about how the Internet once did not exist.
“When I was a boy, there was no such thing as Google. I used to write my homework on paper. It took several hours for photographs to be developed…if you were lucky.
…
I’m serious. You once had to go to a library to do research. Written communication occurred through what you now call ‘snail mail.’ Many people did not have the Internet.”
If my memory serves me well, I’ll detail the early days of the Internet and especially the brave new world that blogs, social networks, and video sharing sites were.
“Yep. I was one of the early bloggers and received an earful for it from my less technically savvy friends who just didn’t ‘get it.’ Back then, you needed to sort of be a geek to be on the Web.
Being a geek helped though. Those who got online in those days had a good chance of being ‘heard.’ It was actually possible to put a website up and become a success in a relatively short period of time.”
I’ll unfortunately need to be nostalgic, just as I am now about the cartoons of my childhood.
That changed over time. There was just too much of…everything. The Web stopped being the voice of the individual and started becoming the noise of people. The ones who yelled the loudest got the most attention.
…
We just couldn’t figure out how to save the good parts of the old ‘atom-based’ systems. The objective journalism of newspapers was replaced by citizen punditry, in part because people stopped reading. Bands stop caring as much about albums in search of their one hit top downloaded wonders.
…
The variety experienced in the early days of the Web faded over time. Small ventures either died or were sucked into vast digital empires, which dwarfed the decried physical monopolies of the 20th century.”
While I’ll want to continue, I imagine I’ll have them sleeping by then or telling their parents, “Grandpa’s boring us with his Internet stories again. ‘Back when I was a kid, I used dial-up to connect to the Internet.’”
