The "pre-internet" times

From the Atlantic article they link:

I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones. A barren expanse of empty time would stretch out before you: waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start. Someone might be late or take longer than expected, but no notice of such delay would arrive, so you’d stare out the window, hoping to see some sign of activity down the block. You’d pace, or sulk, or stew.

Dude, read a book. What the fuck?

I don't have a smartphone and am happy to answer any other questions.

seriously, I would bring a book wherever I went. these people are intellectual voids
- Earlier in the Axios thing they talk about people watching Friends and Seinfeld to understand the before times. But they're forgetting Elaine aghast at Puddy for not reading on a plane. "You're just gonna sit there, staring at the back of the seat?" "Yeah."
- You'd be surprised how little most people actually read books.
- Books, sketchpads, knitting or some other portable craft, table games like flick football and pocket chess, crystal radios. Plenty to do to pass time. There’s nothing on my phone that’s new.
Boomers, Gen Xers and elder millennials are now the last people who remember what it was like to use a pay phone, a paper map, a typewriter, etc. — and they're being rapidly outnumbered by younger adults who don't.
younger millennials and even elder zoomers remember those things, at least the pay phones if nothing else
I'm a YM and I've used all of those things
- Typewriters? I'm an elder zoomer and we had computer class and big personal computers to type on when I was a young kid.
Do you have some kind of portable device that allows others to instantaneously reach you?
- I do have a dumb phone, but I have disabled texting.
I don’t like how the author said this, I but kinda agree with what they are getting at. Any time I’m in a line or waiting for something, I just pull out my phone and amuse myself. Before smart phones, in those situations I was usually just alone with my thoughts. I’m now at the point that being alone with my thoughts can make me a bit fidgety and uncomfortable.
As if the same people who get angry at you for looking at your phone wouldn’t also beat the shit out of you if you pulled out a book. As if you could just pull out a book in line. Do you carry a backpack literally everywhere? Most people don’t, hence what the author said.
Also, reading a book takes quite a bit more commitment, and you’re a little less connected to the environment when you do it.
- There are a lot of books that are pocket-sized, and many people carry purses. I don't have a book every time I'm in line at the grocery store, but for the examples the author uses - "waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start" - yes, of course I'll have a book with me.
  No one's beaten the shit out of me for it yet. (Some folk did look askance at me at a wedding once.) But we're not even talking about "people who get angry at you for looking at your phone," we're talking about people who pretend they have no idea how humans ever functioned without phones.

Most people just watched A LOT more television.

I think they still watch a similar amount. They just also have their phones out now
- Yeah I guess that's another big difference: people used to mostly only be able to consume one dumb thing at a time.
  I think the difference is maybe more pronounced with young people. I remember being like 12 and just... sitting there and watching whole episodes of TV shows, back to back, with commercials and everything. I can't imagine most adults today doing that, let alone kids. You were just sort of captive to whatever happened to be available right then and there. It was usually something you'd seen before, but what else are you going to do? You could read books, but you were also limited to whatever you physically had picked up from the bookstore or library.
- that, and they watch stuff on youtube/tiktok instead
there's a pop-sociology book written in the 80s, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, that convincingly argues against the dominance of mass media. It has some major flaws, which I will allow you to discover for yourself, but its conclusions are very compelling and I think it provides some useful tools for evaluating the deluge of "informative" content.
- Maybe out of favor now as the media landscape has changed, but it used to be standard reading in high school media literacy/criticisn section for English class.
- I remember reading it when I was in high school (early 2000s) and not liking it, but I was dumb and I'd consider reading it again.
- So some boomer argued things weren’t boring enough? Have they ever had a job?
  If people actually had the standards for being entertained they should we would have global communism already. Spending 8+ hours straight where you aren’t allowed to do anything you want to and are expected to subvert all of your brain’s resources to your cash overlord is the most boring experience known to man.
  “Ohhhh I’m bored now at work, the world is ending, the woke agenda has transferred the boredom mind virus” welcome to being under stimulated fucker, wonder how people with ADHD feel when you tell them they’re penalized for fidgeting or looking at their phone?
  Certainly there’s a factor of problematicness with how social media is constantly designed to be as addictive as possible, but for some reason these fuckers always focus on how kids these days are listening to music (a REAL, ACTUAL communist writer unironically claimed this was caused by hedonic treadmilling and not enough organizing, and not just having fucking ADHD) or reading Wikipedia instead of working or while being at class. Maybe blame the boring ass work conditions instead of the technology that’s finally made you realize you deserve more from your time?
  “Why don’t I enjoy looking at a spreadsheet for 70% of my life? My phone has infected me!”
- Is that the one that got posted all over the "normie" internet back in 2011-2012? That makes a half-brained argument against TV and saying that 1984 was too obvious and that people would rebel, and that the real dystopia was Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451? Because I remember reading that title on 9gag back then and wondering if my english skills were failing me, since I could not make sense of that at all.

Cell phones didn't become commonplace until I was in my teens. Before that, we were free! If someone didn't show up when they were supposed to and they didn't answer their home phone we just assumed they were dead and then moved on with our lives. If your car broke down, you sat on the side of the road with your sunshade inside-out and it had a message that asked people to call for help. Presidential Shootings were much more common place. Shoplifting was way easier because there were so few cameras. MTV played music videos!

Shoplifting is actually easier now cause most stores don't want the liability that comes with physically apprehending shoplifters. Most of them still have "Loss Prevention" but they don't have cuffs anymore and aren't supposed to touch you. And local PD usually doesn't care enough to investigate someone who they don't have in custody when they call.
- Lol, I think it may depend on where you live. Most loss prevention departments that i'm aware of spend their time building a case so that the cops can pick you up when you're ready to leave the store. And that's if you're lucky enough to not get shot by some chud that thinks they're sheriff of their store.

Before smart phones I carried a book everywhere I went and would pull it out at any point I'd generally reach for my phone now. I also got lost driving a lot.

I'd always have a portable CD player or radio and would get to be the navigator during family roadtrips and read from the map book
- Hearing people as old as my boomer parents be confused by the amount of physical maps in my car currently is always jarring.
I would have a CD player, book, and GBA/DS on me at all times in high school. Never had an issue with boredom until I got a smartphone. Now it's constantly fighting for my attention and preventing me from do things I want to do

I've met many zoomers who just stopped using a smartphone for several months or years. Myself being one. It's not that hard. Boomers need to put their ipad down for once.

If you're not addicted to ordering food delivery and social media there's really no need for one outside of maybe job requirements.
- the ability to search for any information humanity has acquired at a moment’s notice
- Went to a store once that didn't have prices just item ids which I had to enter on their website to get the information.

things were more boring

way to tell on yourself you fucking dud!

Video games came with manuals that had sections for notes and people actually put notes in there, this was before youtube walkthroughs.

renting final fantasy 2 at blockbuster that had an end game save on it
- Same memory but with FF3/6
- In full color! With glossy pages! Get one of those and a November EGM and you’re set
Nowadays kids just have Tunic smh
Your library of self-made notebooks were the pelts on the wall of your past game conquests.

Give me your downbears all you like: If you’re not old enough to remember having to call friends up using a landline to try and organize anything or just talk, it is nearly impossible to comprehend how much this sucks compared to group chats and texting. Making phone calls suck and I’m so glad I never have to do it anymore.

When you were a kid your friends would be the neighbors due to proximity more than anything else. If you lived in the suburbs your parents probably knew the names and occupations of every person on your street. If you wanted to hang out or play you'd physically walk to the kids house and knock on the door.
When you were older and capable of driving or using other transit by yourself, you'd make plans with people at school, specify a time and place, and then that was pretty much it - you'd go there and have to be punctual and meet them. In contrast plans these days are always temporary and transitory since people can text each other in real time and say they're running late etc.
Wanting to ask a girl out but having to talk to her parents first to get her on the line.
Well, yes, pre-internet is too much. But pre-Web2.0 is just better.

I remember all of this. You read books or a newspaper or listened to music in a queue. Maybe you played a gameboy

Libraries were more commonly used, as were encyclopaedias and later progams like encarta

We had calendars and diaries for meetings.

Most ofnthe same things were there it just wasn't in a tiny box and it was a bit more awkward.

One thing that I think is really interesting to consider is how the information landscape has changed and what implications that has.
Before the internet and the prevalence of the "modern" internet, if you wanted to learn about something (especially if it was very new), then you almost certainly had to be exposed to PR to learn about it. This is especially true if you weren't an academic, so the majority of people.
I think this allowed marketing and PR to have a really captive audience especially because the lag in information was much longer. A news article could run in print media in under 24 hours with a narrative and the message would disseminate amongst people and the next turnaround time for something rebutting or debunking this narrative would be at least another 24 hours, assuming a different journalist was capable of producing an opinion piece with a really quick turnaround time or someone like a commentator or expert might be able to do the same in a letter to the editor (where they would get a tiny column that a lot of newspaper readers wouldn't even bother to read). But in realistic terms it might take a week or a month or longer for a countervailing narrative to emerge if people needed to hear about the article, track it down, do some independent research, and produce something that they might have to shop around in order to get it published somewhere. And then that countervailing narrative often has a lag time where it needs to circulate amongst people, often fairly gradually.
It was much easier for people to get hyped up on bullshit products or services and to be spun a lie or a carefully curated half-truth that could take root long before something more evenhanded and reflective of reality could begin to supplant it. If that latter part ever happened at all.
Now the way that marketing and PR has to function, as well as the thing I'm going to refer to as "narrative curation" (think stuff like Wikipedia or review sites which aren't actually PR but which aggregate info and which tend to preference certain information while deemphasizing other info in a conscious way), is largely very different because the speed at which information travels, the hugely expanded access/ready-accesss to information (yes, technically anybody could go to their local library immediately after receiving info to fact-check and develop a deeper understanding [as long as it was open] but in effect nobody was really doing that and so ease of access is at least as important to consider as a theoretical level of access), and the way that sources of information have been... I don't want to say decentralised because that's not accurate, but more like proliferated or something.
It's also interesting that another major difference is that this older model of information access meant that we structured ourselves to this access, in the sense that people would need to schedule their time around getting the news broadcast or they would have to listen to the radio program at the time that the radio program was playing.
Now I think that we have a situation where our schedule is not structured to our access to information anymore but, because our info access is on-demand, we are structured by our information access in the sense that the boundaries of time and place on information are mostly dissolved and so we become the demographics that are distinguished by how we primarily access our info - think the person who gets their news and politics from streamers on twitch vs the person who gets their opinions shaped by R*ddit comments and moderators vs the people who get their info from their TikTok feed, for example - and then this creates marketing profiles and algorithms that then dictate what info gets served to us; before this, the vast majority of people in the UK would watch the BBC and so there wasn't really a BBC "demographic" that you could describe in any particular detail. It was "British person who owns a TV and regularly watches it as their main source of info and entertainment", or virtually every British person.
I don't know where that leaves us.
I guess I'm just going to say that cultural critique is fascinating and all that but it's mostly just a sideshow and the really important stuff is our material reality so, idk, join a party and get involved in your community or spend your time reading theory instead of thinking about what I've said as being anything more than a curious bit of musing rather than (partly) uncovering some deep truth.
The difference is smaller if you consider that when you don't know what you want, you are not getting positive results from using any technology anyway.
So back then when you don't know what you want, you don't get anything. Now you get exhausting useless activities to kill time. You even start killing time you could use better.
I do remember people considered “in the know” were much more savvy with consumer protective information. Reviews were treated as reviews from relative or expert opinion rather than validation of taste. There were also options for children, teens (the magazine “Zillions” for example, my first taste of criticizing capitalism provided by Consumer Reports for kids), adults and the elderly.
Now, there’s a much less robust testing, renting, reviewing and demoing environment it feels.

A lot of stuff has been said so I won't repeat them, here's a weird one though - I don't know what americans experienced so this might be weird to those people but here on terf island a phenomenon that's not often discussed it that back in the day if you wanted to look at porn you could go for a walk in your local patch of woods. Pre-internet there were piles of porn mags in every patch of woods in the country.

EDIT: Aww fuck "forest porn" is lower in the comments.

Generations of kids hiding them from their parents or something more sinister?
- Yeah kids I assume that stole them from the local top shelf or found a stash at home to steal.
  Either way this is a serious thing that existed that everyone remembers when you remind them.

We still remember the ancient ways. If you separate an old from the internet for a few minutes, you can make them recall, though cutting someone off from the internet is torture under the Geneva Conventions.

I remember getting in trouble reading books and pen spinning instead of paying attention in elementary school rather than doing the same with my phone in highschool

my brain deleted all my archives of playing gameboys (or those weird plastic single-game things), carrying an analog book to IRL read when not home, begging my mom to let me goto the rollerrink, the tall man in the forest, reading MAGAzines, huddling a 22" for the latest episode of whatever weekly shitcom, the phone cable not being long enough to chat outside the kitchen, pogs was before my time but I definitely would have dated a diamond league pog champion, finding a quarter and buying a soda with it, teachers doing nothing about that little shit jeff yanking my hair, doodling in a notebook made from treepulp.

I remember always reading books. Now I read posts from communists sitting on toilets
- Now I read posts from communists sitting on toilets
  Truly an evolution. Soon we'll read posts from communists sitting on toilets in space!
the tall man in the forest
Come again?
finding a quarter and buying a soda with it
I remember quarter sodas, so nice. Soda now is like $6 a can so forget it.
- They are not six dollars lol. Although $1 cans are a rare find 😔
Those plastic games were probably Tiger handheld games, and they fucking blew

Boomers, Gen Xers and elder millennials are now the last people who remember what it was like to use a pay phone, a paper map, a typewriter, etc

idk elder millennials were children pre-internet, their experience isn't going to be the same as gen x or boomers who were adults by the time the internet became so ubiquitous. By the year 2000 there was ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger and texting and Unreal Tournament with online matchmaking. So maybe you werent playing Roblox on your iPad while waiting for your Pizza Hut but you could go home and frag some noobs after eating garlic sticks till you puke in the non-smoking section.

I’ve always argued that it also depended on your economic upbringing. I’m right on the cusp of millennial, but my parents couldn’t afford internet until my junior year of high school. Yeah, the internet existed but it might as well not have, outside of someone bringing halo to school on a usb I missed most of it.
you could, but home internet rates were still pretty low well into the 2000s
Mostly we were LAN cafeing in 2000, broadband wasnt good enough or common enough yet.
$10 overnight LANs were the best.
- When I was in high school, one of my friend's family owned a little computer repair shop. We used to take it over on weekends, cannibalize all the display computers for the best parts, and have all night LAN parties. It was pretty rad.
but you could go home and frag some noobs
A wide smile.

sometimes you'd find porno mags in the woods

Forest porn

I still remember when the term "porn" as a suffix after words like "food" "landscape" "city" used to bother me
actually still does but it's so far past the point of return
- Don't worry I'm talking about porn stashes in forests.
- I'm still bothered by it and actively petitioned for it to be added to the slur filter.
- im not bothered by it, but I'm self-conscious of how less-online people might interpret "yeah /r/PanPorn is great" as something other than makeup.
- The only people who use that are redditors. If you said that in real life you'd be branded a weirdo.
If you took the forest porn magazine home the gods would be angered and your parents would find your stash.

The nutrients shit was GPS.

There was that sweet time before GPS was commercially real for people but the internet was becoming common where you put locations in mapquest and printed out a sheet of directions.

If you couldn't read a map you were kind of fucked. I didn't get a cell phone until I was a junior in high school. I knew my area VERY VERY well when we were growing up cause you were fuckin lost otherwise and we were always roaming around smoking weed and doing dumb shit.

Some folks I know nowadays who always had GPS have no fucking idea where ANYTHING is or what the name of anything is. People who lived here their entire lives and can't get to the closest town without GPS. Its crazy lol

I'm glad my ass was way into local street maps as a kid, because I have an atlas of my city practically branded into my synapses now. I hardly ever need GPS unless I'm going to a specific address.
Yeah I remember printing out the Mapquest papers before a trip and if you miss a turn you are totally fucked
So happy for modern map tools. I've never been the best at navigation and seeing the tech develop was quite the relief.
I remember using the Google maps sms service. You could send a text with a starting and ending address and it would reply with text based step by step directions. Mind-blowing for me at the time.
I started flying as a kid and remember getting mad at the GPS messing with my uptake on map reading in Boy Scouts and driving class. I also remember thinking to myself how grateful I was it’d never leave the cockpit and invade my daily life.
Good times keeping an eye on the odometer so you don't miss that turn. Fortunately I'm very good at navigation, so a GPS is just a luxury for me. But I remember the cross country trips I'd have to take when I was young, I used a full on laptop and a Microsoft mapping software and GPS puck plugged into the USB port.

Bring back landlines, latch-key childhoods, wood panel TVs

landlines
My parents are still on a DSL internet connection. AT&T has been hounding them to switch over to their 5G home internet service because they plan to phase out copper phone lines entirely. Cheap bastards aren't planning to put up fiber any time soon, but here's a 5G modem that's slower amd less reliable than DSL.
So stupid.
Bring back TVs with controls in a visible place on the front of the unit
Sell wood-panelled smartphones to get those sweet sweet nostalgia bucks.
- I can’t help but picture this being the size of a cinder block, like something tied to the gas station bathroom door’s key.
Bring back landlines, latch-key childhoods, wood panel TVs
Thinking about getting some of this for my flat screen t.v:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/970690823/6912mm-woodgrain-single-rolls-embossing?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=woodgrain+stickers

When I was young I just read novels for fun; that's it. If I didn't know something, I'd try and look it up on my father's digital encyclopedia, but obviously it still didn't know everything. If I didn't know something though it was fine, you don't have to know everything.

Before cellphones you had to guess which building the person was in and call that, instead of just calling the person. Or you could leave a voicemail at their house and they'd maybe get back to you at some point in the next week or so.

If it was an emergency and you couldn't get them, you'd call everyone you could think of who was in the general area of where they might have been, and send them out to look for them.

You could answer a ringing pay phone and then try to find the person being called.
- Half my duties at my first job as a maitre de at an Italian restaurant.

No onw can remember

Yeah because it was probably mostly drinking.

Celebrating learned helplessness is cringe.

where is the learned helplessness
literal none of these are helpless. being in line is being in line either way, texting/calling someone is just faster, and it wouldn't be worth the time to go to the library or whatever and look up who was in a movie back in the day.

I think this isn't something specific to the internet and smart phones, it's just the sheer ubiquity and convenience make existing without them unfathomable despite plenty of people in the world living without it, like electricity or running water.

There's a difference between the convenience of a 2014 smartphone and a 2023 one
the former actually improves on convenience by having GPS directions, a camera, and everything else
the latter is like the former but runs 10x hotter and with 10x the eyestrain and you can't change the battery so it's actually significantly less convenient

The new world is dying, the old one is struggling to be remembered.

Yet somehow shit like IRC and mailinglists continue to live on. Like cockroaches.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I once met a friend coming from another direction at a radiohead concert by bringing a mylar balloon.

In another incident, friends got married at City Hall and invited a crew to celebrate afterwards, but I flubbed the directions to the initial meet-up point and then missed all the festivities.

On an unrelated note, there were so many more excuses to get out of things

Good struggle session

partly might be because nobody entered the 2020-internet all at once, and 2000s "internet era" was sort of similar to 90s "non-internet era"

1998 was roughly the year that average Americans started getting internet
I remember that era and it was basically the same as before for any elementary school kid, except in addition to going outside and playing gameboy, you'd also play some games on web browsers

research without google: My first report using google was in elementary school in 1999, and it was just a "supplement" to the already-available physical books we had. This pattern continued well into the 2000s, with the internet only becoming the main source of information (at least in schools) near the late 2000s.

aspects of the internet gradually became more like today--RAM got cheaper, HDD capacities increased, dial-up gave way to DSL/cable etc, and this took several years. As all of these things happened, software became more and more bloated to take advantage of the extra resources

In this thread: Self described leftists do “iPhone bad” unironically

iPhone bad.
- Life was SO INCONVENIENT back in my day! It was SO AWESOME that I had to do all of this DUMB SHIT because KIDS THESE DAYS could NEVER use the Ball Crusher 2900 TO FIND THEIR FRIENDS HOUSE! People are SO STUPID letting technology do things for them! When the COLLAPSE HAPPENS I will be the ONLY ONE LEFT while all these DUMB IPAD KIDS will die immediately (as long as I can find the technology that I also rely on for my livelihood, coffee amirite?!?)! I’m a communist, I just think the MAJORITY OF THE WORKING CLASS IN THE COUNTRY I LIVE IN are INFERIOR BEINGS and are incapable of understanding the IMMENSE BRAINPOWER I emit from my ANUS after I dopamine fast for 78 DAYS STRAIGHT!
  WASN’T IT SO COOL that we had to store porn in the forest? Hahaha, I LOVED going to extreme lengths hiding things from my parents who would BEAT ME if they had even the slightest indication I was a sexual being!
  I LOVE THE BALL CRUSHING FACTORY! Kids these days using the BALL CRUSHING SUBSTITUTE DEVICE have NO IDEA how to REALLY LIVE. Their lives are stuck in the COMMUNICATION DEVICE instead of playing outside with the INSTANT DEATH BRICK LOCOMOTIVES and the MURDER VIRUS. In my day, I would just get the MURDER VIRUS and when my niece FUCKING DIED when they caught it from me, we would just LIVE WITH IT! The GRAY SKIES and SHITTY WEATHER are just hallucinations caused by COMMUNICATION DEVICE, stop living in fear and GO OUTSIDE!
  What’s a SYSTEMIC INCENTIVE? Everyone I think is stupider than me just does it BECAUSE THEY’RE STUPID. That’s not tautological, you’re just COPING AND SEETHING from my EPIC DUNK! I always tell people to JUST READ A BOOK, even though I still haven’t grasped concepts as complicated as SYSTEMIC STRUCTURES or the inherent INFLUENCE THAT ECONOMIC SYSTEMS PLAY ON OUR PSYCHOLOGY.
  CORPORATIONS EXPLOITING US? No, it's just that the dumb normies can't GET OFF THEIR DAMN PHONE, everyone should have the sheer willpower required to resist BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE!
  Aren’t you NOSTALGIC for the DAYS OF THE BALL CRUSHER?
Samsung phone bad

I remember getting lost all the time and spending long hours asleep on the subway

the internet has been an unambiguously bad development in human history

Death to America

This was my “stand around and nod my head to music only I can hear while staring into the middle distance” era

I spent a lot more time playing with school supplies

Internet always existed in my lifetime but for my childhood it was shitty dial-up and porn wasn't worth waiting for. So it was HBO for me.

Lot more downtime. I didn't really know vintage computers were an actual valid hobby i could have until the mid '00s, so I didn't really have many friends. Still don't, outside of those hobbyist circles.

The internet's also the only reason I can actually speak to people who aren't other Americans, too, and since I don't really like other Americans much that makes it kind of nice. It's like a glimpse into a life where i can be more well traveled.