I first "logged on" as a teenager in the late 90s. My access was exclusively at my friend's house, whose dad needed a separate phone line for work-related inter

I first "logged on" as a teenager in the late 90s. My access was exclusively at my friend's house, whose dad needed a separate phone line for work-related internet tasks. I would say nothing has changed and everything has changed. Community-wise, you could find a niche and talk about hobbies and interests (Compuserve chat rooms!) and all that, but all the world's information wasn't indexed yet, so anyone speaking authoritatively would be infallible since no was able to prove them wrong or right unless they cracked open an Encyclopedia Britannica. Or maybe had a CD-ROM and Encarta. Now, literally everyone is "online" in some form. Instead of turning to one of the 3 or 5 trusted news sources that report across their home country, they are now just gathering their info from other users like themselves. If anything the "corporations" have put us more in touch with each other, and people tend to trust an individual more than a corporation, which leads to individuals and corporations attempting to game the system. ---- I gotta say, I like it all better now. I do miss how quaint it all used to feel. The concept of using the internet was special in itself. But it was super hard to find communities that weren't centered around sci-fi or people trying to cyber or people who were obsessed with "computing" in general. I'm a programmer now but my heart has always been in the arts and music, and those art-nerd types didn't start "logging on" until the late 00s imo. Perhaps that's partially due to bandwidth constraints.