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I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything, and it's why mobile p

I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything, and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap. As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they were delayed, can't make it, in the wrong place, hit by a bus, etc. This is inconceivable to post-mobile people: of course you can just instantly contact anybody anywhere and figure out what's up!

jimktrains2 10y ago
It's interesting watching old sitcoms with episodes centered around that very issue. The trying to find a phone, the waiting, the misunderstandings. They all seem...odd now.
- jhbadger 10y ago
  Or horror movies -- the killer has cut the phone lines! We can't call the police!
  - 13of40 10y ago
    Now it's just, "oh, crap, we don't have any signal out here in pumpkin head holler."
nul_byte 10y ago
Access to information has been a double edged sword as well. I am one of the pre-internet oldies and recall how you had to go to the library, and find the book on the topic you wanted to research. It was a case of hoping it was there and not loaned out already, or too old an edition. Quite often, it would already be loaned out, and you had to wait a week or two and then go back, hoping it had been returned on time. Experts back then, were really experts. There was a clear line between expert, hobbyist, and passing interest. Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page.
- codeulike 10y ago
  If its a double edged sword, the positive edge is massive and sharp and very useful, and the negative edge of the sword is like a little needle, that perhaps provides a slight pain in the arse now and then. I remember before, and after is so much better.
  - tzs 10y ago
    The negative edge is what allows Donald Trump to be a viable candidate for President of the United States. It allows people with extreme views who before would have not had close contact with more than a handful of people with similar views (and then often only through inefficient means like a monthly newsletter and its letters column) to find each other and effectively organize in groups large enough to have an impact. The same goes for the anti-vaccination folks, the "climate change is not real" folks, the anti-fluoridation folks, the anti-bike lane/trail and anti-public park people [1], and more. [1] Yes, they are real. Bike lanes and public parks, they believe, are part of a UN agenda to make cities more attractive so that the population will concentrate in the cities, which will make it easier to impose martial law and confiscate guns. Before the internet this would have been a total joke. Now those people can organize, and show up in large groups at city council meetings considering parks and bike lanes, and get those projects killed.
    - prodmerc 10y ago
      Yeah, it's amazing how a tool that let's you find all the facts led to people finding all the facts they want and already believe and using that to further dig themselves into a hole that they believe is real. Though it was easier to just control the masses with TVs and radios - they cant talk back, so you can spout whatever you want at them and they'll follow. Pretty sure that Trump would've been just as popular today if the Internet was not around.
      - CM30 10y ago
        If the media liked him, he could have been a far more popular presidential candidate without the internet. In those places where the local press liked Trump, people would think he was the only viable candidate. The internet has made people wiser and more savvy too. They've stopped one interest group from being able to make their views and messages seem like the only one.
collyw 10y ago
People used to turn up on time a lot more often in those days.
- dano 10y ago
  True. We were unable to reset expectations on the fly and had to meet our original commitment. Interesting observation.
- mathgeek 10y ago
  This observation is anecdotal, IMHO. I very clearly remember waiting on people to show up on time before the Internet, more often than not. There's a reason that "guy sitting on the bench waiting for his date" was a meme even before communication became easier.
aluhut 10y ago
Being one of those pre-internet era kids who started out with a C64, I don't think so. Not having a company and private mobile phone wouldn't change anything to me. I rarely use it and the company can call my cable phone at home when I'm not in the office (where mobiles don't work due to the architects fail). When I'm not at home and not in the office, I'm in the car where I'm forbidden by the employer to use any means to be able to use the phone. For safety reasons. Without the internet, I wouldn't have a job at all. I needed internet before mobiles and I would need it afterwards too. I don't even believe most of the people would carry around those chunky screens (got one of those huge Lumia things as a company phone...ridiculous) with them without being able to access internet with it. Sure being reachable is important but not as important as not having the internet. We managed without mobiles and we still manage when the batteries die.
- eli 10y ago
  I doubt your skills are so specific to the internet that you would be unemployable in a universe without it.
  - aluhut 10y ago
    A brave doubt on hn.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Says the guy whose company is so specific to the Internet that it wouldn't exist in a world without one. Not that I don't see what you're saying, but there are a lot of us out here who've built careers around the Internet which are, at the very least, far better than any other prospect that might've been available to us. Certainly in my own case - absent the Internet, I'm nothing but a mouthy unlettered redneck with no meaningful prospects beyond maybe doing menial lab work for the local university, earning maybe $10k a year over the local median in exchange for a lifetime of daily health risks and all the nonsense that goes with being staff in an academic environment. Don't get me wrong - I'm still a mouthy unlettered redneck, either way. But in a world where the Internet is a thing, I'm a mouthy unlettered redneck who is unaccountably able to earn a very good living for himself, enough so that he can not only support himself in comfortable style but help look after family back home who weren't so fortunate, including the distant cousin who nearly died when his meth lab blew up. So while I'm not wholly unsympathetic to commentary like the Quartz author's, I find myself forced to take it with a grain of salt. Sure, the current situation is not ideal. There are a lot of things that could change for the better. Healthier habits around mobile devices. A more conscious understanding of the effect the Internet has on perception. Facebook burned to the ground, the ground salted, and the ashes buried under a crossroads at midnight. All kinds of things. There are also a lot of people out here like me for whom life in a world with even the Internet we have is vastly better than the best lives we'd be able to make for ourselves in a world without. I think that's something worth keeping in mind in a conversation like this. But then, of course, I suppose I'd almost have to think so, wouldn't I?
increment_i 10y ago
Its funny how many 90's sitcom episodes were based on this exact premise - the uncertainty of someone's location, not being able to contact them, etc. It was a major problem back in the day.
- coldtea 10y ago
  A major problem it wasn't. We could not care less about it. If anything, it was just how things were. We tool it for granted, and we didn't have much difficulty with it. A major movie/sitcom trope, yes.
- tgarma1234 10y ago
  I definitely remember using the phone at the bar I used to hang out at to call home to check my messages on my answering machine to find out where everyone else was planning to be. Or just walking around to familiar places to see if anyone was around. Life was a ton better living that way honestly. People were certainly more real. Now whenever I am around people I find they are compulsively checking their phones for messages and barely present in the moment at all. It's like... now everyone is always somewhere else. Another weird thing about cell phones is that in the pre-cell phone pre-internet era people did not take very many pictures of themselves and taking pictures at a party was kind of a special thing but certainly not the focus of everyone's activity all the time the way it seems to be now. I think it was more fun to just take pictures every once in a while and then have that interesting experience of getting film developed to find out how the pictures turned out. Memories stuck more then.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Similarly i recall my mom using a payphone at some diner during a summer trip to call the grandparents back home. Then some years latter dad got a mobile phone (a brick of a Nokia) that was used sparingly for the same task.
  - hobs 10y ago
    Yeah the picture thing frustrates me, my parents used to have a photo drawer and albums with all the important stuff, now its just facebook. I remember her talking about them as if they were the one thing she would save in a fire, but I doubt she has ever looked at an old facebook photo more than once.
tinco 10y ago
That might feel a little different, and surely is convenient and in some cases even essential. I feel the difference in penetration is just because it's easier to provide mobile phone access than it is to provide broadband/wired connection. Of the people that don't have internet, I bet they don't have landlines or broadband TV either. Mobile phones are just incomparable to the advances the internet has brought. The internet put the whole world into high speed mode. When mobile phones started coming out, they were just something rich people spent too much money on. Most people I know bought their first mobile phone when it became less than $200. When the internet became accessible on mobile phones (and I mean really accessible, not just loading slow terrible UX websites on nerdy HTC Windows Phone palmtops like I had), suddenly even the middle class spent upwards of $800 on their phones. That to me signals how important they feel it is to be connected, not just one to one, but to the entire net. The smartphone is a device that connects you to the internet in a convenient manner, that it's a mobile phone is secondary to that from my perspective.
- jpatokal 10y ago
  I had access to the Internet long before I got a mobile phone, and it was fascinating, but it didn't rock my world in the same way. This was the Internet before HTTP, browsers and search engines: email was store-and-forward via UUCP (look it up), files were stored in FTP, indexing was via Gopher, and access to it all was via pay-per-minute long distance dial up to girlfriend's mom's account at a VAX box at a university using, erm, borrowed credentials. Using the trusty old card index at the local library was both faster and had much higher bandwidth, and things only really started to change when Mosaic and Alta Vista arrived on the scene. I agree that smartphones are another revolution of comparable magnitude, but that started less than ten years ago: we don't even have a first fully-grown up post-smartphone generation yet.
  - Falkon1313 10y ago
    My experience was a bit different. The local university had open-access dial-in numbers, from which you could telenet anywhere, use FTP, Gopher, IRC, Usenet, Archie, Veronica, WAIS, MUDs, email lists, dialout to BBSes, etc. We had lots of informational (and opinion) content, search, newsfeeds with comments, games, chat, and socialization. The main things we didn't have much of were e-commerce, ads, and images/audio/video. My career, many of my hobbies, and lifelong relationships came from that early internet. So it was a life-changer for me. Mobile phones, on the other hand, didn't change much. Before them, we used the ubiquitous payphones when needed. Beepers briefly became a fad, but that faded out even before mobile phones became common; most people just didn't need constant telephone availability.
okket 10y ago
Phones are important but without the internet they are just phones. Even with GPS, you would have to carry the whole world (or a significant amount of it where you live) as a map within your phone. Early pre-"Smart Phone" PDAs did exactly that (with external GPS receiver). Information wise, Google changed everything. There was a before, where you the information was there, but you couldn't find it and an after, where almost every information you want is easily reachable. Wikipedia is also an important milestone, but without proper search (just compare the internal search to Google) it would be a fraction useful.
- rayiner 10y ago
  That's kind of like saying phones are important, but without electricity they'd just be aluminum bricks.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - khedoros 10y ago
    Isn't that the point? If phone's are significantly less useful without the internet, then doesn't that mean that the internet is the more transformational technology?
- ams6110 10y ago
  I do exactly that. My phone has no data plan. I download the local area in Google Maps app when I'm on wifi, then I can use it for navigation without a data connection. I personally do not find the cost of a data plan to be worth it. For anything urgent there's SMS or voice calls. Everything else can wait until I can get on wifi, which is really not much of a hurdle, any hotel lobby, coffee shop, etc. will have it.
  - mafribe 10y ago
    Most of the rest of the world seems to go the other way: voice calls are rare and reserved for emergencies, SMS has been replaced by WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE and the like, and a data-only phone would be much more useful to most than a voice only device.
proofmaster 10y ago
I have to agree with you on that one. Phones did change our lives in a day but internet was like a whole new world for me. It's nice to know you can find literally anything of your interest in just 2 seconds. If people used it more for exchanging and sharing knowledge rather than boosting their ego with social media the world would be so much better.
dabeeeenster 10y ago
Curious to know if the parent poster was alive before the internet was available to consumers? It's hard to get over just how isolated information was before the internet. If you missed a sports score, for example, unless you heard the result fortuitously, you had to wait and read it in the newspaper the next day. CAN YOU IMAGINE? If you wanted to know something relatively obscure, you had to travel to a library and look it up in a dozen books. Sure, phones provide an additional sort of last mile for that sort of thing, but the difference before and after the internet is almost impossible to communicate. Can you imagine "missing the news" on the TV?
- jpatokal 10y ago
  Yes, I was, see another reply below. "The Internet" in the pre-Web form I first encountered it was quite different from what you describe, and close to useless at answering your questions. Also, Teletext was a thing, and it solved the "missing news" problem pretty well, as did TV and radio.
  - dabeeeenster 10y ago
    Yeah admittedly in 1995 it didnt solve these problems either but by 2002 it had done...
jasode 10y ago
>I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything, I disagree somewhat and it's possible the disagreement depends on how we slice up the time ranges of "mobile phone" and "internet". The "internet" divided into 2 periods: pre- www internet: 1980s text based, Usenet, government and universities: post- www internet: 1990s graphics on webpages, google, wikipedia, amazon The "mobile phones" divided into 2 periods: "dumb phones" pre 2007 of Motorola/Nokia "smart phones" post 2007 in the iPhone/Android world Thinking back to 2006, the internet changed daily life much more meaningfully than mobile phones. When I got the "dumb phone" in the 1990s that cost 70 cents a minute, it didn't change my daily life the way Google/Wikipedia/Amazon did. To this day, I probably do 20+ queries on google.com every single day. I hardly interact with my iPhone and I don't install apps on it. In 1998, I remember booking a plane ticket online (the fancy new "e-ticket") from Southwest Airlines and it seemed magical when the gate agent let me board the plane even though I hadn't spoken to a single human being. I'd agree that pre-1990s internet of dialing up into BBS's and chatting on Usenet felt more like a toy than a necessity of life. I'm guessing the folks favoring "mobile phones" as more life-changing than the internet are thinking of post-2007 smartphones. (But I'd argue part of what makes smartphones "smart" is the internet.) If society were forced to choose, I'm confident most would rather have full internet with no mobile phones rather than 100% mobile phone coverage and zero internet infrastructure. Since both technologies grew up together, we can only entertain though experiments about which technology is more meaningful to humanity.
jobigoud 10y ago
Mobile phones allow you to connect with your tribe. The Internet allows you to connect with the entire species.
- ommunist 10y ago
  The modest throughput and memory capacity of individuum cannot describe capacity of connection with the entire species. I am not even speaking about linguistical barriers.
visarga 10y ago
> This is one of those technologies that changes everything Another technology with wide impact is the digital camera, which appeared after 2000, and spread in any and all devices today. We will remember the world since the digital camera in a very different way than before. I have a pittance of analog photos, but over 100K digital ones. People tend to remember only what they photograph. In a few years, we will only remember what we shot pictures of. We tend to lock in those moments to the exclusion of the rest. Along with the internet, I'd say cameras are also a huge influence society.

jimktrains2 10y ago

It's interesting watching old sitcoms with episodes centered around that very issue. The trying to find a phone, the waiting, the misunderstandings. They all seem...odd now.

jhbadger 10y ago
Or horror movies -- the killer has cut the phone lines! We can't call the police!
- 13of40 10y ago
  Now it's just, "oh, crap, we don't have any signal out here in pumpkin head holler."

nul_byte 10y ago

Access to information has been a double edged sword as well. I am one of the pre-internet oldies and recall how you had to go to the library, and find the book on the topic you wanted to research. It was a case of hoping it was there and not loaned out already, or too old an edition. Quite often, it would already be loaned out, and you had to wait a week or two and then go back, hoping it had been returned on time. Experts back then, were really experts. There was a clear line between expert, hobbyist, and passing interest. Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page.

codeulike 10y ago
If its a double edged sword, the positive edge is massive and sharp and very useful, and the negative edge of the sword is like a little needle, that perhaps provides a slight pain in the arse now and then. I remember before, and after is so much better.
- tzs 10y ago
  The negative edge is what allows Donald Trump to be a viable candidate for President of the United States. It allows people with extreme views who before would have not had close contact with more than a handful of people with similar views (and then often only through inefficient means like a monthly newsletter and its letters column) to find each other and effectively organize in groups large enough to have an impact. The same goes for the anti-vaccination folks, the "climate change is not real" folks, the anti-fluoridation folks, the anti-bike lane/trail and anti-public park people [1], and more. [1] Yes, they are real. Bike lanes and public parks, they believe, are part of a UN agenda to make cities more attractive so that the population will concentrate in the cities, which will make it easier to impose martial law and confiscate guns. Before the internet this would have been a total joke. Now those people can organize, and show up in large groups at city council meetings considering parks and bike lanes, and get those projects killed.
  - prodmerc 10y ago
    Yeah, it's amazing how a tool that let's you find all the facts led to people finding all the facts they want and already believe and using that to further dig themselves into a hole that they believe is real. Though it was easier to just control the masses with TVs and radios - they cant talk back, so you can spout whatever you want at them and they'll follow. Pretty sure that Trump would've been just as popular today if the Internet was not around.
    - CM30 10y ago
      If the media liked him, he could have been a far more popular presidential candidate without the internet. In those places where the local press liked Trump, people would think he was the only viable candidate. The internet has made people wiser and more savvy too. They've stopped one interest group from being able to make their views and messages seem like the only one.

collyw 10y ago

People used to turn up on time a lot more often in those days.

dano 10y ago
True. We were unable to reset expectations on the fly and had to meet our original commitment. Interesting observation.
mathgeek 10y ago
This observation is anecdotal, IMHO. I very clearly remember waiting on people to show up on time before the Internet, more often than not. There's a reason that "guy sitting on the bench waiting for his date" was a meme even before communication became easier.

aluhut 10y ago

Being one of those pre-internet era kids who started out with a C64, I don't think so. Not having a company and private mobile phone wouldn't change anything to me. I rarely use it and the company can call my cable phone at home when I'm not in the office (where mobiles don't work due to the architects fail). When I'm not at home and not in the office, I'm in the car where I'm forbidden by the employer to use any means to be able to use the phone. For safety reasons. Without the internet, I wouldn't have a job at all. I needed internet before mobiles and I would need it afterwards too. I don't even believe most of the people would carry around those chunky screens (got one of those huge Lumia things as a company phone...ridiculous) with them without being able to access internet with it. Sure being reachable is important but not as important as not having the internet. We managed without mobiles and we still manage when the batteries die.

eli 10y ago
I doubt your skills are so specific to the internet that you would be unemployable in a universe without it.
- aluhut 10y ago
  A brave doubt on hn.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Says the guy whose company is so specific to the Internet that it wouldn't exist in a world without one. Not that I don't see what you're saying, but there are a lot of us out here who've built careers around the Internet which are, at the very least, far better than any other prospect that might've been available to us. Certainly in my own case - absent the Internet, I'm nothing but a mouthy unlettered redneck with no meaningful prospects beyond maybe doing menial lab work for the local university, earning maybe $10k a year over the local median in exchange for a lifetime of daily health risks and all the nonsense that goes with being staff in an academic environment. Don't get me wrong - I'm still a mouthy unlettered redneck, either way. But in a world where the Internet is a thing, I'm a mouthy unlettered redneck who is unaccountably able to earn a very good living for himself, enough so that he can not only support himself in comfortable style but help look after family back home who weren't so fortunate, including the distant cousin who nearly died when his meth lab blew up. So while I'm not wholly unsympathetic to commentary like the Quartz author's, I find myself forced to take it with a grain of salt. Sure, the current situation is not ideal. There are a lot of things that could change for the better. Healthier habits around mobile devices. A more conscious understanding of the effect the Internet has on perception. Facebook burned to the ground, the ground salted, and the ashes buried under a crossroads at midnight. All kinds of things. There are also a lot of people out here like me for whom life in a world with even the Internet we have is vastly better than the best lives we'd be able to make for ourselves in a world without. I think that's something worth keeping in mind in a conversation like this. But then, of course, I suppose I'd almost have to think so, wouldn't I?

increment_i 10y ago

Its funny how many 90's sitcom episodes were based on this exact premise - the uncertainty of someone's location, not being able to contact them, etc. It was a major problem back in the day.

coldtea 10y ago
A major problem it wasn't. We could not care less about it. If anything, it was just how things were. We tool it for granted, and we didn't have much difficulty with it. A major movie/sitcom trope, yes.
tgarma1234 10y ago
I definitely remember using the phone at the bar I used to hang out at to call home to check my messages on my answering machine to find out where everyone else was planning to be. Or just walking around to familiar places to see if anyone was around. Life was a ton better living that way honestly. People were certainly more real. Now whenever I am around people I find they are compulsively checking their phones for messages and barely present in the moment at all. It's like... now everyone is always somewhere else. Another weird thing about cell phones is that in the pre-cell phone pre-internet era people did not take very many pictures of themselves and taking pictures at a party was kind of a special thing but certainly not the focus of everyone's activity all the time the way it seems to be now. I think it was more fun to just take pictures every once in a while and then have that interesting experience of getting film developed to find out how the pictures turned out. Memories stuck more then.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Similarly i recall my mom using a payphone at some diner during a summer trip to call the grandparents back home. Then some years latter dad got a mobile phone (a brick of a Nokia) that was used sparingly for the same task.
- hobs 10y ago
  Yeah the picture thing frustrates me, my parents used to have a photo drawer and albums with all the important stuff, now its just facebook. I remember her talking about them as if they were the one thing she would save in a fire, but I doubt she has ever looked at an old facebook photo more than once.

tinco 10y ago

That might feel a little different, and surely is convenient and in some cases even essential. I feel the difference in penetration is just because it's easier to provide mobile phone access than it is to provide broadband/wired connection. Of the people that don't have internet, I bet they don't have landlines or broadband TV either. Mobile phones are just incomparable to the advances the internet has brought. The internet put the whole world into high speed mode. When mobile phones started coming out, they were just something rich people spent too much money on. Most people I know bought their first mobile phone when it became less than $200. When the internet became accessible on mobile phones (and I mean really accessible, not just loading slow terrible UX websites on nerdy HTC Windows Phone palmtops like I had), suddenly even the middle class spent upwards of $800 on their phones. That to me signals how important they feel it is to be connected, not just one to one, but to the entire net. The smartphone is a device that connects you to the internet in a convenient manner, that it's a mobile phone is secondary to that from my perspective.

jpatokal 10y ago
I had access to the Internet long before I got a mobile phone, and it was fascinating, but it didn't rock my world in the same way. This was the Internet before HTTP, browsers and search engines: email was store-and-forward via UUCP (look it up), files were stored in FTP, indexing was via Gopher, and access to it all was via pay-per-minute long distance dial up to girlfriend's mom's account at a VAX box at a university using, erm, borrowed credentials. Using the trusty old card index at the local library was both faster and had much higher bandwidth, and things only really started to change when Mosaic and Alta Vista arrived on the scene. I agree that smartphones are another revolution of comparable magnitude, but that started less than ten years ago: we don't even have a first fully-grown up post-smartphone generation yet.
- Falkon1313 10y ago
  My experience was a bit different. The local university had open-access dial-in numbers, from which you could telenet anywhere, use FTP, Gopher, IRC, Usenet, Archie, Veronica, WAIS, MUDs, email lists, dialout to BBSes, etc. We had lots of informational (and opinion) content, search, newsfeeds with comments, games, chat, and socialization. The main things we didn't have much of were e-commerce, ads, and images/audio/video. My career, many of my hobbies, and lifelong relationships came from that early internet. So it was a life-changer for me. Mobile phones, on the other hand, didn't change much. Before them, we used the ubiquitous payphones when needed. Beepers briefly became a fad, but that faded out even before mobile phones became common; most people just didn't need constant telephone availability.

okket 10y ago

Phones are important but without the internet they are just phones. Even with GPS, you would have to carry the whole world (or a significant amount of it where you live) as a map within your phone. Early pre-"Smart Phone" PDAs did exactly that (with external GPS receiver). Information wise, Google changed everything. There was a before, where you the information was there, but you couldn't find it and an after, where almost every information you want is easily reachable. Wikipedia is also an important milestone, but without proper search (just compare the internal search to Google) it would be a fraction useful.

rayiner 10y ago
That's kind of like saying phones are important, but without electricity they'd just be aluminum bricks.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- khedoros 10y ago
  Isn't that the point? If phone's are significantly less useful without the internet, then doesn't that mean that the internet is the more transformational technology?
ams6110 10y ago
I do exactly that. My phone has no data plan. I download the local area in Google Maps app when I'm on wifi, then I can use it for navigation without a data connection. I personally do not find the cost of a data plan to be worth it. For anything urgent there's SMS or voice calls. Everything else can wait until I can get on wifi, which is really not much of a hurdle, any hotel lobby, coffee shop, etc. will have it.
- mafribe 10y ago
  Most of the rest of the world seems to go the other way: voice calls are rare and reserved for emergencies, SMS has been replaced by WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE and the like, and a data-only phone would be much more useful to most than a voice only device.

proofmaster 10y ago

I have to agree with you on that one. Phones did change our lives in a day but internet was like a whole new world for me. It's nice to know you can find literally anything of your interest in just 2 seconds. If people used it more for exchanging and sharing knowledge rather than boosting their ego with social media the world would be so much better.

dabeeeenster 10y ago

Curious to know if the parent poster was alive before the internet was available to consumers? It's hard to get over just how isolated information was before the internet. If you missed a sports score, for example, unless you heard the result fortuitously, you had to wait and read it in the newspaper the next day. CAN YOU IMAGINE? If you wanted to know something relatively obscure, you had to travel to a library and look it up in a dozen books. Sure, phones provide an additional sort of last mile for that sort of thing, but the difference before and after the internet is almost impossible to communicate. Can you imagine "missing the news" on the TV?

jpatokal 10y ago
Yes, I was, see another reply below. "The Internet" in the pre-Web form I first encountered it was quite different from what you describe, and close to useless at answering your questions. Also, Teletext was a thing, and it solved the "missing news" problem pretty well, as did TV and radio.
- dabeeeenster 10y ago
  Yeah admittedly in 1995 it didnt solve these problems either but by 2002 it had done...

jasode 10y ago

>I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything, I disagree somewhat and it's possible the disagreement depends on how we slice up the time ranges of "mobile phone" and "internet". The "internet" divided into 2 periods: pre- www internet: 1980s text based, Usenet, government and universities: post- www internet: 1990s graphics on webpages, google, wikipedia, amazon The "mobile phones" divided into 2 periods: "dumb phones" pre 2007 of Motorola/Nokia "smart phones" post 2007 in the iPhone/Android world Thinking back to 2006, the internet changed daily life much more meaningfully than mobile phones. When I got the "dumb phone" in the 1990s that cost 70 cents a minute, it didn't change my daily life the way Google/Wikipedia/Amazon did. To this day, I probably do 20+ queries on google.com every single day. I hardly interact with my iPhone and I don't install apps on it. In 1998, I remember booking a plane ticket online (the fancy new "e-ticket") from Southwest Airlines and it seemed magical when the gate agent let me board the plane even though I hadn't spoken to a single human being. I'd agree that pre-1990s internet of dialing up into BBS's and chatting on Usenet felt more like a toy than a necessity of life. I'm guessing the folks favoring "mobile phones" as more life-changing than the internet are thinking of post-2007 smartphones. (But I'd argue part of what makes smartphones "smart" is the internet.) If society were forced to choose, I'm confident most would rather have full internet with no mobile phones rather than 100% mobile phone coverage and zero internet infrastructure. Since both technologies grew up together, we can only entertain though experiments about which technology is more meaningful to humanity.

jobigoud 10y ago

Mobile phones allow you to connect with your tribe. The Internet allows you to connect with the entire species.

ommunist 10y ago
The modest throughput and memory capacity of individuum cannot describe capacity of connection with the entire species. I am not even speaking about linguistical barriers.

visarga 10y ago

> This is one of those technologies that changes everything Another technology with wide impact is the digital camera, which appeared after 2000, and spread in any and all devices today. We will remember the world since the digital camera in a very different way than before. I have a pittance of analog photos, but over 100K digital ones. People tend to remember only what they photograph. In a few years, we will only remember what we shot pictures of. We tend to lock in those moments to the exclusion of the rest. Along with the internet, I'd say cameras are also a huge influence society.